南丽湖 Nán lì hú is the water at the centre of Ding’an, a reservoir in the middle-east of the county whose shoreline runs 138 km around sixteen islands and more than seventy peninsulas. It was built as the 南扶水库 Nán fú shuǐkù, begun in April 1959 and finished in 1965, and it is the largest man-made freshwater lake in northern Hainan, with a catchment of 64.5 square kilometres. The province made it a scenic area in 1988 and a key tourist development zone in 1992, and in August 2016 the national forestry administration verified it as a national wetland park. It lies across the towns of 雷鸣 Léi míng, 龙门 Lóng mén and 黄竹 Huáng zhú.
The lake has been a project for sixty years rather than a piece of untouched nature. The golf club opened on 6 April 1997 with twenty-seven holes. In 2009 the county set up a management committee for the lake, and in 2010 it became a national wetland park pilot under the name of the Nanli Lake and Bai Yuchan scenic area. The verification six years later recorded 643.67 hectares of wetland in a single patch, classed as an artificial reservoir wetland. Since then a wetland camping base opened in December 2018 and the Huanle Bay park on the shore opened on 24 January 2025.
The areas are worth stating with their authorities, because they do not agree. The park plan covers 30.63 square kilometres, of which open water is 12.86, or 41.98 per cent, with a wetland rate of 43.35 per cent; a second set of descriptions gives the whole lake 46 square kilometres with 26 of water; a third speaks of twelve square kilometres of water inside a 46-square-kilometre park. What is agreed is the shape and the hardware: 138 km of shoreline, sixteen islands, more than seventy peninsulas, a capacity of just over 91 million cubic metres, and water that stays between 22 and 23 degrees. Water quality moved from class III in 2015 to class II, and protected bird species went from five in 2016 to twelve in 2024.
Most of the visiting happens on the water and immediately around it. The ring road is reported as a closed 29 km circuit and the slow path as anywhere between 5.5 km of patrol walkway and 11 km, lengths that belong to different pieces of infrastructure, and only the patrol walkway is described as already built. The water sports on offer are paddleboard, kayak, wake surfing, open-water swimming, boat trips and fishing, with an agreement signed in 2023 to work towards a national water sports centre, and the events held here include a national open-water swimming championship and the Ding’an happiness run. 醉花岛 Zuì huā dǎo, the Drunken Flower island, is the largest peninsula on the southern shore.
Two things about the lake are said more confidently than the evidence allows. One is its distance from Haikou, given as 30 km, 50 km and 58 km in three places, of which only the 46 km mark of the eastern expressway, where the lake touches the road, means anything on the ground. The other is the claim in county publicity that twelve square kilometres of water makes it three square kilometres larger than the Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan, a boast rather than a survey. What is real is the food: the beer chicken, a free-range bird stewed with wood ear, dried squid, prawns, dates and codonopsis and finished with beer, and the steamed grouper that comes out of this water.
Practicalities
Tickets. No official notice sets a price for the lake. The third-party position is that the main scenic area charges nothing to enter and that boat trips and fishing are paid for separately, while the encyclopaedia entry gives a year-round 09:00 to 23:00, which is a gate time for a place with no gate and should be read as an indication only. The paid facilities are the golf club and the Huanle Bay park, which opened in January 2025.
Opening hours. The lake is open landscape rather than a fenced attraction, so the hours are effectively those of daylight and of whoever is renting out a board or a boat. The best of it is early, when mist lies on the water before the sun takes it off, and the widely repeated advice is to be at the shore by about 06:30; the other good hour is after sunset, because the lake has no light pollution and the county promotes it as a place for meteor showers and the Milky Way.
Closing day. No closing day is reported for the lake and none exists in the ordinary sense, since the shoreline, the ring road and the viewpoints are public and unstaffed. What does change the day is the season: boating, swimming and camping run from November to April, and the operators simply close when the wet months make working the water unreasonable, so a winter visit and a summer visit are two different places.
Getting there. By road take the island ring expressway and leave at either the Huangzhu or the Ding’an junction; the lake is a short drive from both. The public transport option is the intercity line that has run since 10 January 2026 between Mingzhu Square in Haikou and Zhongrui farm in Ding’an, which calls at Nanli Lake’s Huanle Bay as well as at Wenbi Peak, Longmen, Lingkou, Hanlin and Zhongrui.
Give it a day rather than an hour, and give the day to the water: the dam first for the view of the whole basin, then the patrol path for the birds, then one of the peninsulas in the afternoon and the camp or a lakeside table after dark. The pleasure of the place is that it is a working reservoir that turned into something better: 91 million cubic metres of storage, thirteen fish farms inside the reservoir removed, eighty-five fish pens relocated, an island roped off so that nobody lands on it, and a water class that climbed one grade in a decade. Two cautions: the island count and the peninsula count belong to different surveys, and the lake is not a bathing beach, whatever the swimming events suggest.
Getting there: 南丽湖国家湿地公园 lies in the middle-east of 定安县 across 雷鸣镇, 龙门镇 and 黄竹镇, about 30 to 58 km from Haikou by the different published figures and at the 46 km mark of the eastern expressway, reached by the ring expressway’s Huangzhu or Ding’an junction or by the Mingzhu Square to Zhongrui intercity line at the Huanle Bay stop; no official ticket price or hours are published, the boat trips and the golf club are charged separately, and there is no closing day.