Updated August 2026
Ulun Danu Beratan
The temple on the lake, on the banknote, and on every second Bali poster. It looks like the photographs about half the year, and this page is about which half.
Ulun Danu Beratan sits at around twelve hundred metres on the shore of a crater lake, in a part of Bali that is cool, often misty and completely unlike the coast most visitors arrive from. It is dedicated to Dewi Danu, the goddess of the lakes, and it sits at the top of the irrigation hierarchy that waters the rice terraces spread out below it. It is also the single most reproduced structure in Indonesia, printed on the 50,000 rupiah note and on roughly every tourism poster the country has ever issued.
All of those photographs were taken on the same kind of morning, in the same few months of the year, from the same narrow spit of land. That is not a scandal. It is simply the piece of information nobody hands you before you spend a morning in a car, and it is the difference between walking away delighted and walking away wondering what the fuss was about.
This page is organised around the two variables that actually decide the visit: the level of the lake, which changes by month, and the hour you walk through the gate, which changes everything else. Everything after that is logistics.
The temple plus the rest of the highlands
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The verdict in 30 seconds
- It does not float. The shrines stand on islands and a promontory at the lake edge, and they are surrounded only when the water is high.
- March to June is the visual sweet spot. High water left over from the rains, drier mornings, fewer coaches than July and August.
- Morning or nothing. Mist lifting off the water, empty gardens, and the mountain weather has not closed in yet.
- It is a park as much as a temple. Lawns, flowerbeds, boat hire, costume rental and stalls. The shrines themselves cannot be entered.
- Bring a layer. At twelve hundred metres an early morning here is genuinely cold, and everybody arrives dressed for Seminyak.
The thing that decides your visit: how high the lake is
Every famous picture of this temple shows a tiered shrine apparently rising straight out of still water. That is a real view. It is simply not available all the time, and the calendar tells you when it is.
Pick the month you are travelling
Lake Bratan is a crater lake with no meaningful outflow control, so its level follows the rain by a lag of several weeks. Everything you have seen of this temple was photographed at the top of that cycle.
Schematic, not a survey. The point is the direction of travel through the year, not a centimetre reading.
The compromise months
- The water
- Well into the dry season. Water is visibly down and the base courses of the shrine platforms are exposed.
- The photograph
- Workable from the water side, disappointing from the gardens. This is where the framing you choose starts to matter.
- Crowds
- The absolute peak. Coaches from mid-morning without a break
The months everybody visits and the months the site photographs worst. Nothing is wrong with the temple; the water simply is not where the marketing pictures put it. Arrive at opening or accept a lot of strangers in your frame.
Lake Bratan fills the floor of an old volcanic caldera and it has no real outflow to speak of, so its level is a straight function of how much rain the catchment has taken in over the preceding weeks. Through the wet months the water climbs until it reaches the retaining walls and laps at the base of the shrines. Through the dry it falls, slowly and then noticeably, until the platforms the merus stand on are fully exposed and there is a strip of mud, weed or bare stone in front of them.
September and October are the low point, which is a cruel piece of scheduling given how many people visit Bali at the end of the dry season. January through April is the high point, which is when the least people come. The photographs that sold you the place were mostly taken in the second window and are mostly viewed by people planning a trip in the first.
None of this makes the temple less interesting. It makes it a seasonal sight, in the same way that a waterfall is a seasonal sight, and it deserves to be planned like one. If you can move your highland day within your trip, move it towards rain rather than away from it.
Photo Jorge Franganillo, CC BY 2.0
How to check before you drive two hours
Look at recent photographs rather than promotional ones. Search the temple on any map or review platform and sort the images by most recent, or open a geotagged social feed and scroll to the last week or two. Thirty seconds of that tells you exactly where the waterline is sitting today, and it is the single most useful piece of planning anyone can do for this particular site. It also tells you what the weather has been doing, which is the other half of the problem.
What you are actually looking at
The word temple undersells and oversells this at the same time. There are several shrines here, they are not all Hindu, and none of them can be walked into.
Photo LukeTriton, CC BY-SA 4.0
The tall meru on the water
The structure everyone photographs is a meru, a pagoda-like tower of stacked thatched roofs whose count is a statement of rank. The tallest one here carries eleven tiers, which is the highest number normally used and marks a shrine of the first importance. It is dedicated to Dewi Danu and it stands on its own walled platform at the tip of a promontory.
A smaller meru sits further out on a separate islet, and depending on the water it may be entirely cut off. A third, lower structure and a thatched pavilion complete the group. From the shore they read as one composition, which is why almost every photograph is taken from one of two spots.
The Buddhist stupa nobody mentions
Set back in the gardens, on a stepped stone base among the conifers, there is a genuine Buddhist stupa with seated Buddha figures in niches around its drum. It is not decoration and it is not a modern addition for visitors: it reflects the long presence of Buddhist practice alongside Balinese Hinduism at this site.
Almost everyone walks straight past it towards the water, which makes it the quietest and oldest-feeling corner of the whole park. If you have twenty minutes and the causeway is jammed, spend them here instead.
Photo Chainwit., CC BY-SA 4.0
You do not go inside the shrines
This catches people out repeatedly. The walled compounds containing the merus are active places of worship with the gates closed, and signs at each one say so plainly. Visitors circulate on the lawns, the paths and the low causeway, and look at the shrines across a wall or a stretch of water. If you were picturing yourself standing at the foot of the tower on the lake, adjust that now rather than at the gate. The same convention applies at Taman Ayun, where the whole inner courtyard is viewed from a perimeter path.
Why a temple is standing in a lake in the first place
Bali grows rice on terraces that step down mountainsides for tens of kilometres, and the water for those terraces comes out of the crater lakes in the middle of the island. Sharing it is not a plumbing problem, it is a social one, and the Balinese solved it centuries ago with the subak, a network of farming cooperatives that allocate water by rotation and settle their disputes through the temple system rather than through an administration.
A lake temple sits at the top of that structure. Its priests preside over the source itself, and the offerings made here concern the water supply of every subak downstream. This is why the building is on the water rather than merely near it: the shrine and the resource are meant to be the same object. The temple complex is generally dated to the seventeenth century and associated with the kingdom of Mengwi, whose royal temple at Taman Ayun you pass on the road up from the south.
It is worth holding that in mind while you are standing in what is unmistakably a landscaped park with a car park attached. The gardens are recent and the coach traffic is recent. The reason there is anything here at all is that a large number of farmers a long way downhill needed a way to agree about water, and they still do.
Bali has several of these water temples and they follow the same logic. If the subak side of the island interests you more than the photograph, the purification spring at Tirta Empul and the terraces at Tegallalang are the two other pieces of the same story, and both are closer to Ubud than they are to here.
Photo Anandajoti Bhikkhu, CC BY-SA 4.0
The banknote trick
The shrine on the water is printed on the reverse of the Indonesian 50,000 rupiah note. Pull one out of your wallet at the railing and line it up with the real thing: the engraving is taken from more or less the classic viewpoint, and it makes a far better photograph than another portrait of yourself in front of the same gate. It is also the fastest way to explain to anyone at home why this particular temple matters more than its size suggests.
The hour you arrive, and how cold it is when you do
Bedugul is high enough to have its own climate, and that climate runs to a daily timetable. Mist first, then a clear window, then cloud down on the rim by the afternoon.
Pick your arrival hour
At around twelve hundred metres the mountain writes its own weather, and it writes the same script most days. Temperature, cloud and coaches all move through the morning, and they do not move together.
Temperature
18 to 21 °C, warming fastSky over the lake
Mist lifting, the volcanoes across the lake coming outHow busy
A handful of people, mostly photographers and worshippersWear: A light jacket you can take off by nine. Closed shoes: the lawns are wet.
The correct answer. Still water for the reflection, mist breaking up rather than blanketing, the gardens empty, and the light coming across the shrines instead of straight down on them. Everything this page recommends flows from arriving in this window.
The temperature is the part almost nobody plans for. Bedugul runs eight to ten degrees cooler than the southern beaches, all day, every day. That is not a detail: it is the difference between a pleasant morning and standing in a car park in a wet singlet waiting for the shower to pass. People come up from Seminyak in beach clothes because it was twenty-nine degrees when they left, and they regret it within ten minutes of getting out of the car.
The other half of the altitude is rain. The highlands take considerably more of it than the coast and they take it year round, including in the middle of the so-called dry season. A shower here does not mean the day is finished; it usually means twenty minutes under the roof of a warung. But it does mean carrying something waterproof rather than assuming Bali weather is Bali weather.
What all of that adds up to is a simple rule. Leave early enough to be at the gate when it opens, take a jacket you would take to a European spring morning, and treat anything after midday as a consolation prize.
Photo Susan.wibowo, CC BY-SA 4.0
What the rest of the site is like
The shrines occupy a small fraction of what you pay to enter. The rest is a large, well-kept public garden, and how you feel about that determines how long you stay.
Photo Anandajoti Bhikkhu, CC BY-SA 4.0
The gardens
Lawns, hedges and flowerbeds running down to the water, genuinely well maintained and pleasant to walk. In the cool highland air it feels closer to a botanical garden than a temple compound, and the real botanical garden is next door.
The commerce
Stalls, food, boat hire, costume rental and paid photo opportunities including a couple of captive animals. It is a managed attraction rather than a contemplative site, and pretending otherwise sets you up to be annoyed.
The props
A large blue naga fountain, painted statues, a giant frog and various other things placed for photographs. They are cheerful, they are everywhere in the frame, and they are the main reason wide shots of the gardens rarely look like the marketing.
Going out on the water
The one thing here worth paying extra for is a boat. Traditional outriggers and small speedboats run from a jetty a short walk from the shrines, priced per boat rather than per head for a loop out onto the lake. Fifteen or twenty minutes is the standard trip and you will be asked for a good deal more than the going rate at first, which is normal and negotiable.
It matters because it gives you the only angle the coaches never get. From the water the shrines separate out properly, the crowd on the causeway drops out of frame, and even at a low lake level the composition works because you are shooting from the waterline rather than down at it. On a still morning it is also the quietest twenty minutes available anywhere in Bedugul.
Swimming is a different matter and is not done. The lake is sacred, it is cold, it is deep and there is nowhere sensible to get in. If you want water you can actually be in, the highland option is the waterfalls on the way down towards Munduk, most of which have pools.
Photo Anandajoti Bhikkhu, CC BY-SA 4.0
Getting to Bedugul
There is one road up from the south and one down to the north coast, and both of them climb. The drive is the real cost of this temple.
| Coming from | Drive | Leave by, for opening | Obvious stop on the way |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seminyak, Canggu, Kuta | 2 h to 2 h 30 | 04:30 to 05:00 | Taman Ayun at Mengwi |
| Ubud | 1 h 30 | 05:30 | Jatiluwih, on the western loop |
| Lovina and the north coast | 1 h to 1 h 15 | 06:00 | Git Git and the Munduk waterfalls |
| Munduk | 30 to 40 min | 06:20 | The twin lakes viewpoint |
| Sanur or Nusa Dua | 2 h 30 to 3 h | 04:00 to 04:30 | Taman Ayun, or nothing at that hour |
Recommended
Car with driver
Hired by the day, not by the trip, and the standard way Balinese distances are covered. The driver waits, adjusts the route if the weather turns, and knows where the twin lakes viewpoint actually is.
Easiest
Organised day trip
Chains the temple with Handara, the twin lakes and a waterfall. Efficient, and it arrives in the mid-morning window with everybody else, which is the trade you are making.
Experienced riders
Scooter
A beautiful ride and a cold, wet one. The climb is long, the road is busy with trucks, and afternoon rain on a mountain descent is how people get hurt. Fine from Munduk, ambitious from the south.
Not really
Grab, Gojek, public transport
Ride-hailing will take you up and then leave you with no way back, because there are almost no drivers waiting in Bedugul. Buses exist on the Denpasar to Singaraja route and are not a realistic plan.
Coming up from the south, the stop that makes the day work is Taman Ayun, the moated royal temple of the Mengwi kingdom, about forty minutes back down the same road. It opens early, it is almost never busy, and it is listed by UNESCO as part of the subak cultural landscape. Doing the two in one morning is the most efficient temple pairing available on Bali and it puts Ulun Danu Beratan in its historical context on the way.
What it costs, and how long you need
The entrance is trivial. Everything around it accumulates, and the transport dwarfs the lot.
| What you pay for | Detail | Order of magnitude |
|---|---|---|
| Entrance to the temple grounds | One ticket covers the whole garden park. Adults and children are priced separately and the rate is set locally. | ≈ €4 |
| Parking | Charged at the gate and separate from the ticket. Cars and scooters pay different rates. | ≈ €0.50 to €1 |
| Boat on the lake | Traditional outrigger or small speedboat, priced per boat for a loop past the shrines rather than per person. | ≈ €7 to €15 |
| Photograph in Balinese dress | Costume rental stands near the entrance, with the sash, headdress and a photographer if you want one. | ≈ €5 to €10 |
| Driver for the day, from the south | A full day car with driver, since Bedugul is a round trip of four hours of driving minimum. | ≈ €35 to €55 |
All of it is cash, none of it is posted on a board in a way you can rely on, and every figure above moves. Treat them as orders of magnitude, carry small notes, and budget slightly more than you expect. The pattern holds across the island: the ticket is nothing and the accumulation is not, and here the driver is by far the largest line.
The temple
25 to 30 minutes. The causeway, the two viewpoints, the shrines from outside their walls. There is no interior to work through.
The gardens
Another 30 minutes for a full lap including the stupa, which most people skip and which is the best quiet corner on the site.
With a boat
Add 30 to 40 minutes including the haggling and the wait for the boat to fill. Worth it for the angle you cannot get from land.
Door to door
Half a day from Ubud, a full day from the southern beaches once you add the stops that make the drive worth doing.
Hours, dress code and behaving well
Hours
Roughly 07:00 to early evening, with the ticket office closing before the grounds. Nowhere authoritative publishes this and it shifts for ceremonies. Arriving in the first two hours after opening is the version of the day that works.
Dress
Looser than at most temples, because the bulk of the site is a public garden. Shoulders and knees covered is the sensible standard, a sarong if you approach the inner enclosures, and a warm layer regardless of any of that.
Bring
Cash in small notes, a rain layer whatever the season, closed shoes for wet grass, and a 50,000 rupiah note to hold up against the view. Sun cream too: the altitude burns faster than the beach does.
Where the line is
This site is more relaxed than a working sanctuary like Besakih, and considerably more relaxed than the purification pools at Tirta Empul. People picnic on the lawns and children run about. Nobody is going to object to a photograph.
The line is the enclosures. Do not climb the low walls, do not step over a gate that is closed, and do not put yourself in front of an altar for a picture. Balinese custom also asks women who are menstruating not to enter temple grounds; nobody checks, and visitors are trusted to respect it themselves.
Drones and ceremonies
Drone flying over the shrines is restricted and enforcement varies by who is on the gate that day. During a ceremony it is simply not acceptable, and ceremonies here are frequent enough that you should expect to run into one.
If a ceremony is underway, the practical response is to stand back and watch it rather than to work around it. It is the one thing at this site that no photograph on the internet has already shown you, and it is the reminder that the place is still doing the job it was built for.
What else is up here, and why you should use it
An hour at a temple does not justify four hours in a car. The highlands around Lake Bratan do, and everything below is within forty minutes.
If it is specifically the water setting you came for, the other one on the island is Tirta Gangga, a royal water garden in the far east. It is a garden you walk through rather than a shrine you look at across a lake, and it is a different day entirely.
10 minutes
The Handara gate
A split gate on the drive of a golf resort, framing a mountain road. Entirely a photo stop, there is a queue and a fee, and it takes fifteen minutes. Go because it is on the way, not because it is a destination.
Next door
Bali Botanic Garden
Hundreds of hectares of highland forest, orchid houses and a bamboo collection, with a treetop adventure park inside it. Enormously underused compared with the temple across the road, and the best rainy morning option in Bedugul.
20 minutes
Buyan and Tamblingan
The twin lakes, seen from a roadside viewpoint on the ridge above them. Quieter, wilder and considerably less commercial than Bratan. Tamblingan still has canoe trips run by the villages on its shore.
40 minutes
Munduk and its waterfalls
A coffee-growing village on a ridge with a cluster of tall waterfalls below it. If you want to turn a temple stop into a proper day in the highlands, this is where you go, and it is where you should sleep if you can.
50 minutes
Jatiluwih
The great subak terraces on the flank of Batukaru, on the western loop back down towards the coast. The counterpart to the lake temple: this is the water arriving where it was always meant to go.
On the roadside
Bedugul market and strawberries
The altitude grows things the rest of Bali cannot, and the roadside is lined with produce stalls and strawberry farms. A cheap, genuinely local ten minutes and the best place up here to eat something that is not fried.
The itinerary that makes this work
Leave the south before dawn, stop at Taman Ayun as it opens, reach Ulun Danu Beratan by eight, spend an hour there including a boat, then run north over the pass to the twin lakes and down to Munduk for a waterfall and lunch. Home by late afternoon, or better, stay the night in Munduk.
That version turns a disappointing photo stop into one of the best days on the island. The temple on its own, arriving at eleven in September, is the version that generates the shrugging reviews, and the difference between the two is entirely planning.
So is it worth it
Go if
- You are travelling between December and June, when the lake is high and the shrines sit in water.
- You can be at the gate within an hour of opening, which requires leaving the coast in the dark.
- You are making a day of the highlands rather than driving up for one building.
- You are heading to or from the north coast anyway, in which case it is directly on your route.
Skip it if
- You are in Bali for four or five days and based in the south. The drive eats a disproportionate share of the trip.
- It is September or October and recent photographs show the shrine on dry stone.
- You can only get there in the afternoon, when the cloud is down and the light is gone.
- You came for temples rather than scenery, in which case Lempuyang and Besakih are the more serious sites.
The honest summary is that Ulun Danu Beratan is a genuinely beautiful thing in a genuinely beautiful place, badly served by its own fame. Nothing about it is fake and nothing about it is a tourist trap in the way people mean when they use the phrase. It is a working water temple in a spectacular caldera, with a garden around it and a car park beside it, and the internet has promised you a version of it that exists for part of the year and part of the day.
Turn up in that window and you will understand immediately why the country put it on the money. Turn up outside it and you will have driven two hours to look at a nice pagoda by a lake, which is a perfectly pleasant thing to have done and not what you were sold. The whole of this page exists to put you in the first group. For the rest of the island's sanctuaries and how they compare, the Bali temples guide sorts them by what they actually offer rather than by how often they are photographed.
Ulun Danu Beratan: common questions
Is Ulun Danu Beratan Temple worth visiting?
What is the significance of the Ulun Danu Beratan Temple?
How long does it take to visit Ulun Danu Beratan Temple?
Which part of Bali is Ulun Danu Beratan Temple?
Does Ulun Danu Beratan actually float?
Is Ulun Danu Beratan the temple on the 50,000 rupiah note?
What is the best time to visit Ulun Danu Beratan?
What is the entrance fee for Ulun Danu Beratan Temple?
What are the opening hours at Ulun Danu Beratan?
What is the dress code for Ulun Danu Beratan?
Can you go inside Ulun Danu Beratan?
Can you swim or take a boat on Lake Bratan?
How far is Ulun Danu Beratan from Ubud?
Is there anything else to do near the temple?
Read next
Bali temples
Which ones are worth the drive, the dress code, and how to combine them.
Taman Ayun
The quiet royal temple in a moat, on the same road up from the south.
Lempuyang
The Gates of Heaven, the queue, and the mirror trick behind the photograph.
Tirta Empul
The purification spring, and how to bathe in it without getting it wrong.
Bali waterfalls
The highland falls below Munduk and how they compare with the ones near Ubud.
Ubud
The closest realistic base for a morning at the lake temple.