Kayangan Lake
Fresh and salt water in layers inside a limestone bowl, two hundred steps up.
Duration
1 hr 30 min – 2 hrs
Difficulty
●●○○○
Best time
On the first trip of the morning
Open
Every day
Entry price
To confirm
Kayangan is a crater lake on Coron island, cut off from the sea by a limestone barrier. Its water is reckoned the clearest in the Philippines: you see the bottom at fifteen metres, and the rock walls drop vertically.
It is stratified — fresh water on top, brackish below — and the boundary is visible to the eye as you swim, like a blurred pane of glass. You reach it by a stone stairway of some two hundred steps over a col, from which the classic photograph of the rock-strewn bay is taken.
Getting there
On Coron island, thirty minutes by boat from Coron town. Every bay trip stops there.
What the price covers
entry fee collected by the Tagbanua community, rate to be checked; it comes on top of the boat trip
Rules on site
Sunscreen is banned in the lake and it is checked: it wrecks the water's balance. The steps are uneven and slippery, and there is no continuous handrail.
