The Most Beautiful Glaciers in Europe
6 places in 3 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful glaciers in Europe are Aletsch Glacier (Switzerland), Vatnajökull (Iceland) and Snæfellsjökull (Iceland). The list covers 6 glaciers in 3 countries. Iceland has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Europe keeps its ice in two very different worlds. In the Alps, glaciers are the last tongues of the Ice Age sheets, fed by snow on peaks above four thousand metres and flowing down valleys they carved themselves. In Iceland, sitting astride the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, ice caps lie directly on top of active volcanoes, so that fire and frost shape the same landscape and eruptions beneath the ice can release sudden floods of meltwater.
The Aletsch Glacier, in the Bernese Alps, is the largest in the Alps: a river of ice more than twenty kilometres long, its dark medial moraines running down the middle like lanes on a road. Vatnajökull is Iceland's great ice cap, covering several volcanoes and spilling outlet glaciers towards the south coast. Its southern summit, Öræfajökull, is an ice-filled volcano crowned by Hvannadalshnúkur, the highest point in Iceland.
Snæfellsjökull caps a cone at the tip of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, the mountain through which Jules Verne sent his travellers in Journey to the Center of the Earth. Torfajökull covers a rhyolite volcano whose colourful slopes lead down to Landmannalaugar, while the Mer de Glace, on the northern flank of Mont Blanc, is the longest glacier in France and has drawn visitors up from Chamonix since the eighteenth century.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aletsch Glacier | Glacier | Switzerland | ✓ |
| 2 | Vatnajökull | Glacier | Iceland | |
| 3 | Snæfellsjökull | Volcano | Iceland | |
| 4 | Mer de Glace | Glacier | France | |
| 5 | Öræfajökull | Volcano | Iceland | |
| 6 | Torfajökull | Volcano | Iceland |
01 Aletsch Glacier
Aletschgletscher
Switzerland46.442° N 8.077° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Christian David · CC BY-SA 4.0 The glacier's signature is its dark medial moraines, two stripes of rock debris that run down the middle of the ice for almost its entire length, traces of the tributary glaciers that merged upstream. Seen from the ridge above, the white river of ice with its dark lines, framed by peaks of four thousand metres, is one of the great sights of the Alps. The glacier is also a record of climate: it was far larger during the last ice age, when only the summits of the Bettmerhorn and Eggishorn rose above it, and it is shrinking now, having lost more than three kilometres of length since 1870.
Did you know? Since 1862 locals have walked an annual procession of about five hours to the Ernerwald chapel on 31 July to renew that vow.
02 Vatnajökull
Iceland64.400° N 16.800° W
Image by photovicky from Pixabay Beneath the ice are active volcanoes, and the collision of fire and ice is what makes Vatnajökull extraordinary. Grímsvötn, a caldera buried under the glacier, erupted in 1996 and again in 2011, when its ash plume rose to about 17 km. Heat from below melts the ice into subglacial lakes that can burst out as floods called jökulhlaups; one in 1934 released about 15 cubic kilometres of water. On the southern rim stands Öræfajökull, whose summit Hvannadalshnúkur, at about 2,110 metres, is the highest point in Iceland.
Did you know? That eruption wiped out the prosperous district of Litlahérað and some forty farms; the area was later called Öræfi, a name that came to mean wasteland.
03 Snæfellsjökull
Iceland64.807° N 23.776° W
Anjali Kiggal · CC BY-SA 4.0 The volcano has been quiet since its last eruption around 200 CE, but it is not considered extinct, and the lava fields and small craters around its base tell of a long, active past. The glacier that gives the mountain its name is shrinking fast. It covered some 16 square kilometres in 1946, about 14 in 1999 and only 10 to 11 by 2008, and in August 2012 the summit was recorded free of ice for the first time. Seeing it now means seeing a glacier in the middle of its disappearance.
04 Mer de Glace
France · 35.5 km from Aosta45.916° N 6.937° E
Image by Simon from Pixabay The glacier forms where the Glacier de Leschaux and the Glacier du Tacul meet at around 2,100 metres, and it is fed from above by the Talèfre and Géant glaciers and the snowfields of the Vallée Blanche. In places the ice is up to 300 metres thick. Its name is usually traced to two British travellers, William Windham and Richard Pococke, who climbed up from Chamonix in 1741 and compared the surface to a lake whipped up by wind and suddenly frozen; their account, published in 1744, helped launch Chamonix as a destination. Goethe, Victor Hugo and John Ruskin all came to see it, and Mary Shelley set two meetings between Victor Frankenstein and his creature on the glacier in Frankenstein (1818).
Did you know? Counting all its tributaries, it is France's longest and largest glacier and the second longest in the Alps after the Aletsch.
05 Öræfajökull
Iceland64.025° N 16.642° W
Ferdinand Stöhr fellowferdi · CC0 Its gentle white profile hides a violent past. When the Norse settlers arrived, the mountain was called Knappafellsjökull and the land at its foot was a prosperous farming district known as Litlahérað. In 1362 the volcano erupted explosively, throwing out around ten cubic kilometres of pumice and ash, the largest explosive eruption in Iceland since settlement. Meltwater floods, pyroclastic flows and thick tephra buried the farms, and ash drifted as far as mainland Europe. The district lay empty for decades, and when people returned it took a new name, Öræfi, which originally meant a coast without harbours but came to mean "wasteland". The mountain was renamed after it.
Did you know? The 1362 eruption of Öræfajökull was the largest explosive eruption in Iceland's recorded history.
06 Torfajökull
Iceland63.894° N 19.010° W
Chmee2 / Valtameri · CC BY 3.0 The heat that shaped these hills is still close to the surface. The caldera holds one of the largest geothermal fields in Iceland, full of steaming vents, boiling mud pools and hot springs. At Landmannalaugar, on its northern edge, warm water wells up at bathing temperature beside a black lava flow, and at Hrafntinnusker, higher up, warm streams and fumaroles have melted caves into the ice, something rarely seen in Iceland. The glacier that gave the volcano its name has shrunk to a remnant on the south-eastern rim. Local tradition holds that it is named after Torfi, a farmer who fled a plague with his household and hid in a sheltered valley beneath the ice.
Did you know? The colourful hills of Landmannalaugar are built of rhyolite from the Torfajökull volcano.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful glaciers in Europe?
- On our list, Aletsch Glacier (Switzerland) ranks first, followed by Vatnajökull (Iceland) and Snæfellsjökull (Iceland).
- Which country has the most glaciers in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Iceland (4), France (1) and Switzerland (1).
- What is the longest glacier in the Alps?
- The Aletsch Glacier in the Swiss canton of Valais, at roughly 23 kilometres. It is the centrepiece of the Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch World Heritage Site.
- Why are there glaciers on volcanoes in Iceland?
- Iceland lies on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge above a mantle hotspot, and its high, snowy interior lets ice caps build up over volcanic peaks. When a volcano erupts under the ice, the melting can cause a glacial outburst flood known as a jökulhlaup.
- Which glacier appears in Journey to the Center of the Earth?
- Snæfellsjökull in western Iceland. In Jules Verne's 1864 novel, the explorers enter the Earth through its crater.
- How many glaciers are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 6 glaciers in 3 countries. Iceland has the most, with 4.