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The record
312 m1,024 ft
King Fahd's Fountain
Saudi Arabia
The record
The tallest fountain in the world is King Fahd's Fountain, in Saudi Arabia — 312 m (1,024 ft), jet height.
Source: Saudi Press Agency via Wikipedia (King Fahd's Fountain); Guinness-listed tallest fountain. Verified .
Search for the world's tallest fountains and you will mostly be handed a list of ghosts. Seoul's 202-metre World Cup Fountain has not run since 2015. The Gateway Geyser across the river from St Louis was taken apart in 2023.
Jieyang's 188-metre river jet was lifted out of the Rong River in 2025. This countdown ranks only the twelve that still throw water, from 120 metres up to a single Saudi jet more than twice that tall, spread across eight countries and four continents. Two rules decide who is on it.
The measure is the rated maximum height of a fountain's tallest jet — the engineering figure its operator publishes, such as the 560 feet Fountain Hills reaches on all three pumps, rather than a lucky gust someone caught on video. And it has to be a permanent public fountain that runs today, which is why Karachi's 620-foot Port Fountain, dormant for years with no evidence of a restart, sits this one out.
The tallest fountain on Earth runs on seawater.King Fahd's Fountain draws straight from the Red Sea rather than recirculating fresh water, which is why its plume is heavier — and its plumbing harder to keep alive — than anything else here.
Tallest and largest are two separate records. Guinness gave the largest-fountain title to Dubai's Palm Fountain at The Pointe in 2020, a different measure entirely; that one has since stopped running, while the height record has stayed in Jeddah since the 1980s.
The very tallest jets are fired, not pumped. The 460-foot columns at the Fountains of Bellagio come from compressed-air cannons running at up to 500 psi — no pump can throw water that hard.
Las Vegas and Dubai share a fountain designer. The California firm WET built both the Bellagio fountains and The Dubai Fountain, which is why the two shows rhyme.
Five of these twelve are in China — Ordos, Heyuan, Luoyang, Nanchang and Suzhou. No country has built giant municipal music fountains at anything like the same rate.
Geneva's Jet d'Eaustarted out as a safety valve. It was installed in 1886 to bleed pressure off the city's hydraulic power network, and only moved into the lake as a landmark in 1891.
At 312 m1,024 ft, King Fahd's Fountain throws water almost as high as the Eiffel Tower stands — and it does it with the sea.
Almost every other fountain on this list recirculates fresh water; this one draws straight from the Red Sea and fires it back up at roughly 375 km/h, holding more than sixteen tonnes of saltwater in the air at any instant. King Fahd gave the fountain to Jeddah in the early 1980s, and it reached its full working height in 1985.
It sits just offshore from the Jeddah Corniche, which means there is no single best vantage point so much as a whole waterfront of them; the plume is visible from most of the city and is floodlit after dark. The design was inspired by Geneva's Jet d'Eau, which appears at number nine on this list at well under half the height — a useful measure of how far ahead of the field the Jeddah jet really is.
22. Ulan Mulun Lake Music Fountain
Ulan Mulun riverside square, Kangbashi District, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China
At 209 m686 ft, the main column of the Ulan Mulun Lake Music Fountain is the tallest jet in Asia and the second tallest anywhere, yet it is barely known outside China. It stands on the riverside square at Kangbashi, the spaciously planned district of Ordos out in Inner Mongolia, and it is the reason a good number of visitors make the trip at all.
The headline jet is only part of the machine. Around it sits a supporting array of 2,970 nozzles, 199 pumps and 1,687 underwater lights, choreographed with lasers and a water-screen projection into a full evening show. It runs nightly from 20:00 to 21:00 and costs nothing to watch, with extra performances laid on for public holidays.
33. Fountain Hills Fountain
Fountain Park, Fountain Hills, Arizona, United States
At 170.7 m560 ft with all three pumps open, the Fountain Hills Fountain was the tallest in the world when it first fired in 1970 and kept that title for more than a decade. Three 600-horsepower turbine pumps drive 7,000 gallons a minute through a single nozzle, and the whole desert town northeast of Phoenix took its name from the result.
You will rarely see the full 560 feet. Ordinary operation uses two pumps for roughly 300 feet, one pump on a windy day for about 170, and all three only when conditions are calm and the occasion warrants it. The fountain plays for fifteen minutes at the top of each hour between 9am and 9pm, so timing a visit is easy — and the nozzle doing the work is still the one installed in 1970.
44. Xinfeng River Music Fountain
Xinfeng River, Yuancheng District, Heyuan, Guangdong, China
At 169 m554 ft, the Xinfeng River Music Fountain took the Asian height record when it opened in February 1999, and it was built astonishingly fast — construction started that October and the jet was running four months later. It sits in the channel of the Xinfeng River as it runs through Heyuan, between two of the city's road bridges.
Beyond the central column there are 1,068 nozzles and 618 underwater lights working through the supporting water forms, and the whole show is free. Heyuan is a modest city by Guangdong standards and the fountain is comfortably its best-known sight; the evening performance draws a crowd onto both riverbanks and the bridges in between.
55. The Dubai Fountain
Burj Khalifa Lake, Downtown Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
At 152.4 m500 ft, The Dubai Fountain is the tallest jet on this list that most travellers will actually build a trip around. It runs 275 m along Burj Khalifa Lake in the middle of Downtown Dubai, lit by 6,600 lights and 25 colour projectors, and it was designed by WET, the California firm also responsible for the Bellagio fountains at number eight.
Treat its placing as a dead heat. Canberra's jet at number six is rated 152 m, forty centimetres less — a smaller gap than either fountain loses to a crosswind, so on a given evening either could be the taller of the two.
The fountain went dark in April 2025 for a full refit and returned on 1 October 2025 with a rebuilt basin floor, new choreography and upgraded sound and lighting; a second phase of that work is due through 2026.
66. Captain Cook Memorial Jet
Central Basin, Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
At 152 m499 ft with both pumps running, the Captain Cook Memorial Jet lifts around six tonnes of Lake Burley Griffin into the air above the middle of Canberra. Queen Elizabeth II inaugurated it on 25 April 1970, marking two centuries since Cook charted the east coast of Australia, and it has been part of the city's skyline ever since.
On a single pump it settles to a still-substantial 114 m. It plays daily from 11am to 2pm, though the operators will cut it when the wind is up — the spray blows across Commonwealth Avenue Bridge — and during drought when the lake level drops. It is effectively level with The Dubai Fountain at number five, the two published figures separated by just forty centimetres.
At 150 m492 ft, Tokyo Aqua Symphony is far and away the newest entry here: it opened on 28 March 2026, which makes it younger than most people's phones. It stands 170 m offshore in Tokyo Bay off Odaiba Marine Park and stretches 250 m wide, with Rainbow Bridge and the Tokyo Tower sitting behind it in almost every photograph.
The water choreography borrows its shape from the Somei Yoshino cherry, Tokyo's official flower, and the opening programme pairs a Dragon Quest sequence with one scored by the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. Ten-minute shows run hourly from 11am to 9pm and are free; the observation deck by the replica Statue of Liberty has become the default viewpoint, though sightseeing boats now work the bay during performances too.
88. Fountains of Bellagio
Bellagio, Las Vegas Strip, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States
At 140.2 m460 ft, the tallest jets of the Fountains of Bellagio are not really pumped at all — they are fired. Compressed air at up to 500 psi drives the nozzles known as extreme shooters, launching a single column of water off the lake in a way no pump can match, which is why the peak moments of the show arrive as a bang rather than a swell.
The 8.5-acre lake in front of the hotel holds 22 million gallons and carries 1,214 nozzles in four sizes: oarsmen reaching 77 feet, minis at 100, supers at 240 and the extremes above them all. WET designed it and it opened in October 1998. Geneva's Jet d'Eau at number nine is rated 140 m, twenty centimetres behind — another dead heat. Shows are called off once the wind passes 25 mph.
At 140 m459 ft, the Jet d'Eau is the tallest fountain in Europe and by some distance the most photographed thing in Geneva. Five hundred litres of lake water leave the nozzle every second at 200 km/h, which puts roughly seven tonnes of water above the harbour at any moment and produces a rainbow whenever the sun is at the right angle.
It began life as plumbing rather than spectacle: a safety valve on the city's hydraulic power network at the Coulouvrenière works in 1886, which Genevans liked enough to keep and, in 1891, move out into the lake as a feature in its own right. The installation you see today dates from 1951, when it was rebuilt to pump lake water rather than mains water.
It is rated twenty centimetres below the Fountains of Bellagio at number eight, which is a dead heat by any honest reading. Since 2003 it has run through the year rather than seasonally, pausing only for frost or high wind, and it is floodlit on spring and autumn evenings. A stone pier runs out to the base, and walking it in a breeze means getting soaked.
1010. Kaiyuan Lake Music Fountain
Kaiyuan Lake, Luolong District, Luoyang, Henan, China
At 138 m453 ft, the main jet of the Kaiyuan Lake Music Fountain climbs straight off Luoyang's central axis, directly opposite the municipal government building — a piece of civic staging that is very deliberate and reads clearly from the air. Construction began in December 2005 and the fountain was running on trial by the end of the following January.
The scale of the wider installation is hard to take in: more than 5,500 nozzles sit in the water alongside some 1,400 pumps and over 22,000 colour lights, and one element is a 369 m computer-controlled run of jets that fires in sequence down the length of the lake. Shows are a Saturday-evening fixture lasting twenty minutes, with the fountain resting through the coldest months from December to March.
1111. Qiushui Square Music Fountain
Qiushui Square, Honggutan District, Nanchang, Jiangxi, China
At 128 m420 ft, the centre jet of the Qiushui Square Music Fountain leads what is generally billed as the largest music fountain group in Asia. It sits on the Gan River in Nanchang's Honggutan district, looking directly across the water at the Tengwang Pavilion — one of the great towers of southern China, and the reason the setting works as well as it does.
Spread along a 400 m stretch of riverbank are 814 nozzles and 311 pumps producing thirteen distinct water forms, upgraded in 2013 with rotating heads and gas-burst effects. The square itself opened in January 2004 and takes its name from a line in Wang Bo's Tang-dynasty preface to the Tengwang Pavilion, in which the autumn waters and the wide sky share a single colour.
1212. Suzhou Bay Music Fountain
Yuehutai, Taihu New Town, Wujiang District, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China
At 120 m394 ft, the Suzhou Bay Music Fountain brings up the rear of this countdown, and it is the only entry that answers water with fire — flame effects are built into the show alongside the jets. It runs 350 m along the Yuehutai waterfront in Taihu New Town, on the Wujiang shore of Lake Tai southwest of Suzhou proper.
The hardware runs to 1,353 nozzles and 2,842 underwater LED lights working through sixteen choreographed water-dance patterns, which is a lot of machinery for what is essentially a free municipal amenity. Performances are a Friday-to-Sunday evening fixture from roughly March to November, with extra sittings over Chinese New Year, Labour Day and the National Day holiday, and they are called off in rain or strong wind.
FAQ: The World's Tallest Fountains
What is the tallest fountain in the world?
King Fahd's Fountain in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, rated at 312 m1,024 ft. It has held the title since the mid-1980s and nothing built since has come close — the runner-up, on the Ulan Mulun river at Ordos in Inner Mongolia, is more than a hundred metres shorter. Uniquely among the giants, the Jeddah jet pumps seawater straight from the Red Sea.
Is the Gateway Geyser near St Louis still running?
No. The 192 m geyser at Malcolm W. Martin Memorial Park in East St Louis, Illinois played from 1995 until 2023, when it was taken apart ahead of a planned National Park Service transfer of the park. Officials described the equipment as past its useful life and confirmed it would not be coming back, which is why it is absent from this ranking.
Is The Dubai Fountain open again after its refurbishment?
Yes. It went dark in April 2025 for a major refit and resumed performances on 1 October 2025, with a rebuilt basin floor, fresh choreography and upgraded lighting and sound; a second phase of the work runs through 2026. Its tallest jets still reach 152.4 m500 ft, which makes it the fifth tallest fountain operating anywhere.
What is the tallest fountain in Europe?
Geneva's Jet d'Eau, at 140 m459 ft — and nothing else on the continent is close. It pushes 500 litres of lake water a second at 200 km/h, holding roughly seven tonnes in the air at any moment. It runs year round apart from frost and high wind, and a stone pier lets you walk out to the base.
Why do published fountain heights vary so much?
Because a jet's real height shifts minute to minute with the wind and the pump setting. Fountain Hills reaches 560 feet on all three pumps but ordinarily runs nearer 300, and Jeddah's fountain is quoted anywhere between 244 m and 312 m. This ranking uses each operator's rated maximum — the engineering figure — rather than whatever a plume happened to do on the day. The same rule governs our other world record countdowns.
