The Darvaza Gas Crater was set alight to burn off a pocket of gas, and more than half a century later it has never gone out. Known worldwide as the 'Door to Hell,' it is a pit roughly 70 metres across and 30 deep, sunk into the flat Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan and filled with hundreds of flames fed by methane from the gas field below. The usual story is that Soviet geologists drilling here in 1971 collapsed the ground into a cavern and torched the escaping gas, expecting it to burn out within days — but Turkmenistan keeps no record of it, and some local geologists say the ground fell in during the 1960s and was lit only in the 1980s. Nobody really knows how old the fire is. Either way, it has become the country's defining sight: a ring of fire that appears without warning in an empty plain, edged by scorched sand and the smell of gas.
The crater only becomes itself after dark. By day it is a smoking hollow, but as the sun drops the pit fills with deep orange light, the hot air above it wavers, and its glow carries for kilometres across the black desert. Most visitors camp at the rim, spending a night between a sky crowded with stars and the roar of the fire below; reaching it means a long drive north from Ashgabat into one of the world's least-visited countries. That spectacle is now fading. Since 2022 the government has been working to put the crater out — to curb its methane and gas losses — drilling wells nearby to draw the gas away, and by 2025 the once-roaring flames had shrunk to scattered pockets. Officials have renamed it the 'Shining of Karakum.' For now it still burns, but the Door to Hell may not stay open much longer.