Rarely does an industrial accident develop into a major tourist attraction.
But when a Soviet exploration team drilled for natural gas in Turkmenistan more than 50 years ago, they reportedly set off a chain reaction that created the Darvaza Gas Crater: a giant, flaming hole that eventually became the country’s most sought-after tourist attraction.
Also called the “Gates of Hell” and the “Shine of Karakum,” the phenomenon is caused by methane-fueled flames escaping from dozens of vents along the crater’s floor and walls. If you stand near the rim, you can feel the intense heat emanating from the hole. It’s especially dramatic at night, with tongues of fire blazing beneath a starry sky.
The crater is located in a remote part of the Karakum Desert, surrounded by dunes and rock formations. It is a major stop on almost any journey through this Central Asian country.
When travelers first came to Darvaza, there were no visitor services or amenities, and you had to bring everything you needed for an overnight stay. Today, there are three permanent camps offering overnight accommodations in yurts or tents, as well as meals and motorized transportation to the crater rim for those who don’t want to walk.
The crater is about 230 feet (70 meters) wide and 100 feet (30 meters) deep, with vertical walls that drop sharply into a rocky debris field scattered across the bottom. A safety fence was added in 2018 to prevent visitors from getting too close to the burning sinkhole.
“It’s a collapsed gas cave, which sounds about as interesting as an old gas furnace,” says author Ged Gillmore, who wrote about the crater in “Stans By Me: A Whirlwind Tour Through Central Asia.”
“But there’s something creepy about it, and I actually found it quite scary.”
The crater, however, will not be there much longer, at least not in its fiery form. The Turkmen government has on several occasions mentioned the possibility of sealing the crater in some way. Meanwhile, those who have visited Darvaza for years say the flames are much smaller than they once were.
“I would say it’s only at 40% of the level I first saw there in 2009,” says Dylan Lupine, whose UK-based Lupine Travel was one of the pioneers in bringing tourists to Turkmenistan.
“There were flames burning over a much larger part of the crater then. Now there are fewer, and they are not as high as they were.”
A local guide, who asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media, stands at the edge of the crater and confirms that the flames have been getting lower over the past seven years and during his approximately 40 visits to Darvaza.
“There used to be more flames than there are now, probably because the gas bubble is running out,” he says.
But that doesn’t detract from the allure of this hybrid man-made/natural wonder, which is especially impressive when a sandstorm rolls in, obscuring everything but the flickering fire rising from the dark pit below.
Mysterious origin
No one knows exactly when the gas crater formed, probably because reports from the Soviet Union are missing, incomplete or still confidential.
“There is a lot of controversy and disagreement about how it started,” said George Kourounis, a Canadian adventurer and television host who is the only known person to have explored the inside of the gas crater.
“I don’t even know what to believe. There are so many stories and mythologies about this place. It’s crazy.”
According to Kourounis, the most common theory is that the crater formed in 1971 and caught fire shortly afterward.
“But when I was in Turkmenistan, two old school government geologists came with us to the crater. They told me that the crater had formed sometime in the 1960s and that mud and gas had been seeping out of it for a while and that the crater didn’t ignite until the 1980s.”
How the gas first ignited is another mystery.
“Some say it was a hand grenade,” Kourounis adds. “Some say the Soviets just threw a match in there. I heard a story that at one point a drunken farmer drove his tractor into it.”
The local guide offers another theory: “There was a village nearby at that time and I heard that they set the crater on fire because they didn’t want the smell to ruin life or the poisonous gas to be harmful to the health of the villages. They thought it would burn out in a few weeks.”
Besides the thrill of diving into a burning crater, Kourounis was on a National Geographic-funded science mission to find life forms that could survive in that environment, specifically life forms that might provide clues to what we might find under similar conditions on other planets.
During a 17-minute descent in 2013—wearing an aluminized suit with a Kevlar harness and Technora tethers of the type used on NASA missions to Mars—he collected soil samples for the Extreme Microbiome Project. Later analyses revealed simple organisms, such as bacteria and thermophiles, that somehow managed to survive the crater’s extreme temperatures.
Reach Darvaza
The gas crater is a four-hour drive north of Ashgabat, the national capital. Four-wheel drive is strongly recommended for the journey along the rough two-lane and sandy desert roads that lead to Darvaza.
Along the way you often encounter wandering camels.
Apart from the general stores in Bokurdak and Erbent, remote desert villages along the highway, there is nowhere to stock up on supplies after Ashgabat.
Darwaza Camp is the most luxurious of the three lodging options. The camp is located about a five-minute walk from the crater rim and features yurts with beds and chairs, a shaded dining area and porta-potty/outhouse style toilets.
On the other side of the crater, Garagum Camp offers yurts with futon-like floor mats on traditional Turkmen carpets, solar-powered interior lighting and evening barbecue meals served on outdoor tables.
Garagum is located about a 10-minute walk from the crater rim and even closer to a small rocky hill where visitors can get a bird’s-eye view of the Gates of Hell.
“Arriving at Darvaza at night is absolutely the best,” says Gillmore. “It’s an incredible sight to see for the first time from a distance after hours of driving through the desert. There are no lights anywhere nearby and you really feel like you’re at the gates of hell.”
Nearby are two other accidental craters—formed around the same time and by a similar drilling failure—that are about as large as Darvaza, but not nearly as spectacular.
At the intersection of the asphalt road and the dirt road to Darvaza there is a gas crater with much smaller flames. Further south along the highway towards Ashgabat there is a water-filled crater with gas bubbles but no flames.
Will the gas crater disappear?
There has been talk for years that the Turkmen government wants to transform Darvaza into a natural gas production site by extinguishing the flames.
In 2022, the state newspaper Neytralny Turkmenistan reported that the president had asked his cabinet to consult with scientists to find a way to extinguish the flames and close the site to tourism.
Reasons cited for closing the crater included the loss of a valuable natural resource, environmental damage, and health concerns.
Since then, there has been much talk about the crater’s predicted demise, but there is still no concrete evidence that the government will extinguish the flames any time soon.
According to some, the government has already conducted test drilling in the area, which has removed a significant amount of gas that escaped through the crater, significantly reducing the level of the flames.
“It’s just rumors,” says the local guide, who adds, “there’s still nothing official about the termination.” And he wonders how that could happen.
“They can fill it with cement or foam, but the gas will just escape somewhere else. We don’t know how it will happen or if it will happen.”
CNN Travel has reached out to government officials for comment on the future of the crater.
Lupine, who revisited the site earlier this year, agrees that Darvaza is doomed.
“The locals believe that this will be another attempt to finally extinguish the flames,” says Lupine. “There is a lot of concern among the locals, because they believe that if the crater is extinguished, tourism to Turkmenistan will take a huge hit and many of them will become unemployed.”
The Darvaza Gas Crater continues to amaze visitors who make the long and arduous trek through the Karakum Desert to see this natural wonder of Turkmenistan.
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