Turquoise Lake Wapnica

Jezioro Turkusowe is a former chalk quarry at Wapnica on Wolin island, worked into the twentieth century and then flooded - accounts differ on whether deliberately or by breaking into groundwater - leaving a lake of about nine hectares and up to twenty metres deep in a bowl of white chalk with beech forest around the rim. The colour is the point: dissolved calcium carbonate in the water scatters light so the lake reads as a strong turquoise or green depending on the season and the sun, and it is one of the more photographed things on the Polish Baltic coast. The best view is not from the shore but from Piaskowa Gora above it, reached on a marked path in about twenty minutes, from which the whole bowl and the Szczecin lagoon beyond are visible together. It is inside Wolin National Park. Swimming is prohibited and the sides are steep.

What you actually see

• A flooded chalk pit - nine hectares and twenty metres deep in a white bowl.
• Dissolved carbonate colour - the turquoise coming from the chalk in the water.
• The Piaskowa Gora viewpoint - twenty minutes up, showing the bowl and the lagoon together.
• Beech around the rim - Wolin National Park forest closing the bowl.

When to go

April to October; sun for the colour. Two hours.

Honest expectations

Swimming is prohibited and the banks are steep. The colour is much weaker in cloud. Summer brings heavy crowds from Miedzyzdroje. Parking at Wapnica is limited.

Nearby

Miedzyzdroje is north-west; the Szczecin lagoon is south.