If the Gobi is Mongolia's arid, ochre face, Lake Khövsgöl is its exact opposite: water, forest and freshness. Tucked away in the north of the country, a stone's throw from Siberia, this enormous mountain lake is the deepest in Mongolia and one of the oldest and cleanest in the world. Mongolians call it the 'blue sea' because its surface, more than 130 kilometres long, has the scale and colour of an inland sea; its water is so clear that in many places you can see the bottom, and it holds the country's largest reserve of fresh water. Surrounded by taiga, meadows and snow-capped mountains, it is one of the most beautiful and wild corners of Central Asia.
Khövsgöl is also a sacred place. For the nomadic herders, the Darkhad and the Tsaatan who live in the region, the lake and the mountains are inhabited by spirits, and shamanism —that ancient nature religion, older than Buddhism— is still alive on its shores. It is a land of horses and reindeer, of forests still home to elk, bears and wolves, and of a nomadic way of life that here, far from everything, has changed little. Coming north means changing pace: riding among larches, sleeping in a ger by the water, watching the sun rise over the lake in total silence.
This guide tells you how to reach this far corner of the north (flying to Mörön or overland from Ulaanbaatar), how many days to give it, what to do at the lake —horse riding, kayaking, hiking, visits to families—, when to go so you don't find everything closed, and how to combine it with the great adventure of meeting the Tsaatan, the last reindeer herders. Getting to Khövsgöl takes time and an appetite for the road, but few things are as rewarding as waking up facing this blue sea in the middle of the taiga.
Lake Khövsgöl is one of Mongolia's great geological wonders: it formed more than two million years ago in a rift valley, the same kind of fracture in the Earth's crust that gave rise to its neighbour and big 'sibling', Lake Baikal, to which it is connected by the Egiin River and with which it shares wildlife and origin. At 262 metres deep, it is the deepest lake in the country and an immense reserve of fresh water. For millennia its shores were the territory of nomadic peoples of the taiga and the steppe: the Darkhad in the neighbouring valley, the Tsaatan reindeer herders in the northern forests, and the Buryats and Khalkha with their herds. For all of them, the lake and the mountains were sacred, the dwelling place of spirits, within the shamanism that is still practised today. In the 20th century, under the socialist regime, the region remained remote and sparsely populated, and the lake was used as a transport route, including for fuel between Mongolia and the Soviet Union. After the opening up of the 1990s, Khövsgöl became a protected national park and one of the country's star natural destinations. Our history page tells you more about the lake's geology, its peoples and the shamanism of the north.
Read the full history ↓The forested north next to Siberia: Lake Khövsgöl, the crystal-clear 'blue lake', the taiga of the Tsaatan and their reindeer, and Amarbayasgalant, one of the most beautiful monasteries in the country, which partly survived the purges.
Read the history of The north and Lake Khövsgöl →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Some places are measured in centuries and others in geological eras. Lake Khövsgöl belongs to the second group. It formed more than two million years ago at the bottom of a rift in the Earth's crust. A little further north, the same kind of tectonic trough gave rise to the colossal Lake Baikal in Siberia. That's why Khövsgöl is called Baikal's 'little brother': the two share an origin and wildlife, and they're even linked by water. The river that flows out of Khövsgöl travels a long way and ends up feeding the Baikal basin. They're two drops from the same ancient lake system in the heart of Asia.
Khövsgöl's numbers are impressive. At 262 metres deep, it's the deepest lake in Mongolia. It's about 136 kilometres long and sits more than 1,600 metres above sea level, surrounded by mountains over 3,000 metres high. It holds about 70% of all Mongolia's fresh water and around 0.4% of the planet's liquid fresh water. That's a huge reserve for a country that, oddly enough, suffers droughts and water shortages in other regions. Its water is extraordinarily pure: clear, cold and drinkable in many spots, making it one of the cleanest lakes in the world.
That mix of age, depth and purity makes Khövsgöl a unique ecosystem, with fish and other organisms adapted to its cold waters. Every winter the lake freezes over completely, and the ice gets thick enough to carry vehicles. During the socialist era, trucks loaded with fuel crossed the frozen lake between Mongolia and the Soviet Union. More than one accident sank its cargo, and those loads still raise pollution concerns today. That industrial past is behind it now, and the lake is above all a nature sanctuary and a sacred place.
For thousands of years, the shores of Khövsgöl and the valleys around it have been home to nomadic peoples of the taiga and the steppe, and that human diversity is one of the region's treasures. The meadows are grazed by the herds of the Khalkha Mongols, the country's majority ethnic group. They live alongside Buryat communities, a Mongol people related to those across the Siberian border. West of the lake lies the vast Darkhad Valley, home of the Darkhad people, who are famous throughout Mongolia for keeping a very strong shamanic tradition alive.
Further north, larch forests of the taiga stretch towards the Russian border. There live the Tsaatan, or Dukha, the last reindeer herders in Mongolia. They're just a few hundred people who raise reindeer in the mountains and live in tipis, a way of life found nowhere else in the country. We cover it in detail in the Tsagaan Nuur guide. All these peoples share a nomadic culture built around the horse (or the reindeer) and the ger (or the tipi). They also share a deep bond with a natural world they see as alive and inhabited by spirits.
That worldview has a name: shamanism. It's one of humanity's oldest forms of spirituality, thousands of years older than the Buddhism that later reached Mongolia, and it's still very much alive in northern Khövsgöl. According to shamanism, everything in nature is animated by spirits, including mountains, rivers, trees and the lake itself. Certain people, the shamans, can talk to these spirits by going into a trance. They do it to heal illness, protect the herds or restore balance. Lake Khövsgöl and its surrounding mountains are sacred, and its shores are dotted with ovoos. These are mounds of stones and branches decorated with blue cloth, where travellers leave offerings and walk around three times in the direction of the sun to ask for a safe journey.
For the peoples of the north, Khövsgöl isn't just a resource but a sacred presence. It's sometimes called 'mother sea' and treated with ritual respect: nobody dirties its water, people make offerings to it, and the mountains around it are venerated, some of them considered especially sacred. This sacredness has its roots in ancient shamanism and in Tibetan Buddhism, which spread across Mongolia from the 16th century. Buddhism didn't wipe out the old beliefs; it blended with them, so many ovoos and sacred mountains combine Buddhist and shamanic symbols.
The 20th century put that spirituality to the test. After the 1921 revolution, Mongolia became the world's second communist state, closely aligned with the Soviet Union. In the 1930s the regime launched a brutal campaign against religion. Hundreds of Buddhist monasteries were destroyed and tens of thousands of lamas were executed or imprisoned. Shamans were persecuted too: they were forced to hide their practices or simply killed. In remote regions like northern Khövsgöl, though, far from state control, many traditions survived in secret, passed down from generation to generation in the valleys and forests.
The socialist regime fell and democracy arrived in the early 1990s, and those beliefs came back strongly. Today shamanism is having a revival in Mongolia, and the north is one of its great centres, especially the Darkhad Valley and the shores of the sacred lake. Travellers who reach Khövsgöl and see the ovoos with their blue cloth, or respectfully attend a ceremony, are witnessing one of the oldest and toughest spiritual traditions on the continent. It survived a century of persecution.
For most of the 20th century, Lake Khövsgöl was a strategic border region, tied more to the Soviet economy and supply lines than to tourism. Its port of Khatgal, at the southern tip, was a transport hub for goods and, above all, fuel. Ships and trucks carried it across the lake, or over the ice, between Mongolia and the Soviet Union. That activity left environmental scars, including fuel that sank in the lake after some accidents. Given how precious these waters are, those sites are still being monitored today.
Everything changed with the end of the socialist bloc. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Mongolia opened up to the world in the early 1990s, the old trade route lost its purpose. The country began to see Khövsgöl differently: not as a transport route but as a natural treasure. The lake and its surroundings were declared a national park to protect them from human impact. That covers its pristine waters, its taiga forests and its wildlife, including moose, deer, bears, wolves, argali and a remarkable variety of birds.
In recent decades, Khövsgöl has become one of Mongolia's star destinations, the green, cool counterpart to the Gobi. Dozens of ger camps have sprung up along its shores. Every summer, travellers come from all over the world, and above all from Mongolia itself, where the lake is almost a place of pilgrimage. They come to ride through the forests, paddle on the water and switch off in nature. The challenge, as in so many beautiful places, is to grow without destroying. That means keeping clean a lake that holds 70% of the country's fresh water, respecting the peoples who consider it sacred, and preserving this blue pearl of northern Mongolia for generations to come.
