Region

Pitch Lake, La Brea

Culture & history Nature & outdoors Adventure & active

At first glance, Pitch Lake looks like an enormous, slightly warped car park — dark, oval, roughly 109 acres of what appears to be hardened clay. Then you step onto it. The surface hisses. It burps. In places it gives a little under your weight, soft pockets that behave like slow quicksand. This is the largest natural asphalt deposit on earth, and it is still very much alive.

During the rainy season, shallow sulfurous pools collect across the surface, ringed by water rose and nymph lilies, and herons pick their way around the edges. The lake is worked commercially — you'll see pump houses and processing equipment at the margins — yet somehow the place feels ancient and indifferent to all of it.

Good to know

Open daily 9am–5pm, including public holidays. Entry is around $50 TT, paid at the visitor facility. A guided tour — roughly an hour — is required to walk the lake; guides depart from the same building. Wear closed, sturdy shoes. If you visit in the rainy season, bring a swimsuit for the sulfur pools.

The story

How Pitch Lake, La Brea came to be

Sir Walter Raleigh passed through in 1595 and used the pitch to caulk his ships — an early, pragmatic encounter with a geological curiosity. The Spanish later called the area Tierra de Brea, land of pitch, a name that eventually contracted into La Brea. Commercial interest sharpened in the 1840s when Abraham Pineo Gesner extracted kerosene from the lake's bitumen, and by 1887 an American businessman named Amzi Barber — known as The Asphalt King — had secured a 42-year monopoly concession from the British government, beginning large-scale export the following year.

Ownership passed through several hands over the next century. In 1978, Lake Asphalt of Trinidad and Tobago Limited was incorporated to manage extraction and processing, and in 1994 the Trinidad and Tobago government formally established the La Brea Pitch Lake Asphalt Reserve.

People & landmarks

Who and what shaped it

People who shaped it

Sir Walter Raleigh

British adventurer who claimed discovery of Pitch Lake in 1595 and used the pitch to caulk his ships.

Abraham Pineo Gesner

First extracted kerosene from Pitch Lake bitumen in the 1840s.

Amzi Barber

American businessman known as 'The Asphalt King' who secured a 42-year monopoly concession in 1887, beginning large-scale pitch export in 1888.

Landmark buildings

Visitor Facility Museum

On-site museum on the first floor of the visitor facility where admission is paid and official tour guides are arranged.

Pump House and Processing Equipment

Commercial extraction and processing infrastructure on the outskirts of the lake, operated by Lake Asphalt of Trinidad and Tobago Limited since 1978.

Practical

Plan your visit

On the map

When to go

The dry season runs January to May, when the lake surface is most stable and the pools are shallow or absent — easier walking, less drama. From May onward the rains arrive and deepen the sulfur pools considerably; temperatures stay warm year-round, rarely straying outside the high 20s Celsius, with humidity sitting steadily around 75–78 percent.

Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.