The Door to Hell Has Been Burning in the Desert Since 1971
In the middle of the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan, there’s a hole in the ground that’s been on fire for more than fifty years. Locals call it the Door to Hell. It’s roughly 70 meters wide, glows orange around the clock, and shows no sign of running out of fuel.
Nobody planned for it to burn this long — or, depending on which version of the story you believe, at all.
How a Gas Field Turned Into a Permanent Bonfire
The most widely repeated account traces back to 1971, when Soviet geologists drilling for natural gas hit an underground cavern that collapsed beneath their equipment, swallowing part of the drilling rig and opening a crater filled with methane. Worried about the gas poisoning nearby villages and wildlife, the engineers reportedly decided to burn it off — a controlled measure expected to clear the pocket of gas within a few weeks.
That was over fifty years ago. The crater is still burning.
The exact dates and details have been disputed by researchers and Turkmen officials over the years — some accounts place the collapse later, in the 1960s, and the Soviet-era records that would settle it definitively are incomplete or classified. What isn’t disputed is that the field beneath the crater sits on one of the largest natural gas reserves on Earth, which is exactly why it hasn’t gone out: there’s simply an extraordinary amount of fuel still feeding it.
Why It Hasn’t Been Put Out
Turkmenistan’s government has floated the idea of extinguishing it more than once, partly over concerns about wasted gas reserves and partly to reduce the environmental impact of a continuously burning methane source. In 2010, officials suggested closing it off entirely. It’s still burning.
Part of the difficulty is practical: smothering a crater of this size, fed by a pressurized underground reservoir, isn’t as simple as covering a campfire. Any serious attempt risks reigniting nearby ground or triggering new collapses in an area already known for unstable terrain.
People Actually Visit It
Despite Turkmenistan’s reputation as one of the most difficult countries in the world to get a tourist visa for, the Darvaza crater — its official name — has become a genuine, if small-scale, tourist attraction. Visitors typically arrive at dusk, when the glow is most dramatic against the desert sky, and camp nearby overnight. There’s no fence, no ticket booth, and no official visitor center — just a wide, fire-lit hole in an otherwise empty stretch of desert, radiating enough heat that most people don’t get closer than a few dozen meters.
In 2013, Canadian explorer George Kourounis became the first person confirmed to have descended into the crater itself, wearing a heat-resistant suit, to collect soil samples from the crater floor — partly out of curiosity about whether anything could survive that close to the flames. Researchers later confirmed that heat-tolerant bacteria were, in fact, living in the soil at the bottom.
So: a hole that was supposed to burn out in a few weeks, in a country most people couldn’t point to on a map, has been on fire for the entirety of most people’s lifetimes, hosts microbial life at its base, and gets visited by tourists who show up specifically to sleep near an open flame the size of a football field. Genuinely one of the stranger places on the planet — and it’s not going anywhere soon.
