Pink Salt Lake Koyashskoe

Tourists, arriving at Lake Koyashkoye, freeze in admiration for the landscape seen in front of them.
Tourists, arriving at Lake Koyashkoye, freeze in admiration for the landscape seen in front of them.

One of the most beautiful and fantastic places in Russia – Pink Salt Lake Koyashskoe on the Kerch Peninsula in Crimea. Lake of scarlet to magenta color, as if someone threw into it a couple of tons of Potassium permanganate. Like a fairy tale, when you see such a miracle, hard to believe it is real. Its shores composed of crystallized salt with the scent of viola, and water has a color from light pink in spring to deep red in the peak of summer heat. In addition, on the mirror-like surface one can see the incredible scenery of frozen stone and salt icebergs …

wildflowers and Crimean spring tulips add new colors to the amazing landscape
wildflowers and Crimean spring tulips add new colors to the amazing landscape

Besides, the color of water turns into a brilliant pink in hot weather; and in the low temperature the water takes on different shades of red, purple and blue. Indeed, the area looks like a Martian landscape during the dry season when the water evaporates and the salt crystals are subjected to thermal stress.

Sunset on Lake Koyashskoe
Sunset on Lake Koyashskoe

The fabulous lake of pink color is located where seemingly nothing beautiful can be – among the windswept, literally sprinkled with salt and sun-scorched Cimmerian steppe. Such bright pink spots, which from the height looks like stolen from sea and repainted in different colors.

In fact, this lake is a kind of gigantic natural chemical laboratory for the study of the survival of living beings and microorganisms in an aggressive environment. However, on the bottom of the lake – an extinct volcano mud, and this rose water – a direct consequence of the turbulent life activity of microscopic green alga.

Pink Salt Lake Koyashskoe
Pink Salt Lake Koyashskoe

Koyashskoye lake is separated from the Black Sea by a strip of land 4 kilometers long, 2 kilometers wide and a meter deep. Meanwhile, the lake, not widely known to the tourists, has healing properties, and therefore appreciated by the locals.

Pink Salt Lake Koyashskoe
Opuk Nature Reserve, April 2013.

Pink Salt Lake Koyashskoe

Pink Salt Lake Koyashskoe
during dawn, when the ideal surface of the lake gradually changes color from pale pink to bright red.
Pink Salt Lake Koyashskoe
One liter of lake water contains 350 grams of salt
Pink Salt Lake Koyashskoe
Opuk