The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in Iceland
22 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful natural wonders in Iceland are Strokkur, Kirkjufell and Hverfjall. The list covers 22 natural wonders. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Iceland is one of the youngest landmasses in Europe and still being built. It sits astride the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart, directly above a hotspot that feeds the rift with magma. The result is an island of fresh basalt, active volcanoes, steaming geothermal fields and fissures that open across the land, all under a cold, wet climate that keeps great ice caps on the highlands and lets rivers cut deep gorges into soft volcanic rock.
The rift itself is visible here. At Þingvellir, the cliff of Almannagjá marks the edge of the North American plate, and nearby the Silfra fissure fills with glacial meltwater so clear that divers see a hundred metres ahead. In the geothermal field at Haukadalur, Strokkur throws a column of boiling water into the air every few minutes, and Vatnajökull, the largest ice cap in Iceland, covers active volcanoes beneath its ice.
Fire has left many other marks. Around Lake Mývatn, the tephra ring of Hverfjall and the twisted lava pillars of Dimmuborgir show two kinds of eruption side by side, and the Laki Craters trace the fissure of the eruption of 1783, among the most destructive in recorded history. On the coasts, Kirkjufell rises in a neat cone above Grundarfjörður, the basalt stack of Hvítserkur seems to drink from the sea, Dyrhólaey ends in a great rock arch, and the bird cliffs of Látrabjarg mark the island's western tip.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Strokkur | Geyser | |
| 2 | Kirkjufell | Summit | |
| 3 | Hverfjall | Volcano | |
| 4 | Vatnajökull | Glacier | |
| 5 | Hvítserkur | Stack | |
| 6 | Snæfellsjökull | Volcano | |
| 7 | Dimmuborgir | Rock formation | |
| 8 | Fjaðrárgljúfur | Canyon | |
| 9 | Almannagjá | Canyon | |
| 10 | Silfra | Karst spring | |
| 11 | Dyrhólaey | Natural arch | |
| 12 | Öræfajökull | Volcano | |
| 13 | Laki Craters (Lakagígar) | Volcano | |
| 14 | Torfajökull | Volcano | |
| 15 | Látrabjarg | Cliff | |
| 16 | Askja | Volcano | |
| 17 | Ásbyrgi | Canyon | |
| 18 | Jökulsárgljúfur | Canyon | |
| 19 | Raufarhólshellir | Lava tube | |
| 20 | Vestrahorn | Mountain | |
| 21 | Þríhnúkagígur | Volcano | |
| 22 | Stuðlagil | Canyon |
01 Strokkur
Iceland64.313° N 20.301° W
Image by Hans from Pixabay Its behaviour has not always been so regular. Strokkur is first recorded in 1789, after an earthquake cleared its conduit, and in the nineteenth century its eruptions varied — in 1815 they were estimated at up to 60 m. Around the turn of the twentieth century another earthquake blocked it, and it lay quiet until 1963, when, on the advice of the Geysir Committee, locals cleared the blocked conduit through the bottom of the basin.
Did you know? About 15 seconds before an eruption, a large steam bubble rises through the conduit and lowers the pressure below, setting off explosive flash boiling.
02 Kirkjufell
Iceland64.948° N 23.311° W
Steven Diaz stevendiazphoto · CC0 The mountain's clean outline comes from ice. During the glacial periods Kirkjufell stood above the surrounding ice sheet as a nunatak, and the glaciers ground away the land around it while its flanks were steepened. Its body is layered: bands of Pleistocene lava alternate with sandstone, and a cap of tuff crowns the summit. Those layers are visible as faint horizontal stripes across its slopes, especially after snow picks them out.
Did you know? Its distinctive bent tip earned it the nickname Arrowhead Mountain when it appeared in the sixth and seventh seasons of Game of Thrones.
03 Hverfjall
Iceland65.604° N 16.872° W
Stephen · CC BY 2.0 That is close to the truth. Hverfjall (also called Hverfell) is a tephra cone or tuff ring, formed in one explosive eruption around 2,500 years ago in the southern part of the Krafla fissure swarm, the volcanic system that still dominates the Mývatn district. When rising magma met water in the ground, the violent interaction shattered both into fine fragments that fell back around the vent to build the steep circular wall.
Did you know? The crater sits in the rift zone where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart by roughly 2 centimetres a year.
04 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.
Did you know? Its 2014–2015 fissure eruption at Holuhraun, north of the ice cap, poured out more than 1.2 cubic kilometres of lava in six months.
05 Hvítserkur
Iceland65.606° N 20.635° W
Image by susnpics from Pixabay Local tradition holds that Hvítserkur is a troll who set out to destroy the monastery at Þingeyrar across the bay and was caught by the rising sun and turned to stone. The story has a curious modern sequel: in the middle of the 20th century, worried that the sea would bring the "troll" down, local farmers shored up its base with concrete, so that the troll still stands.
Did you know? Iceland's postal service put Hvítserkur on a postage stamp in 1990.
06 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.
07 Dimmuborgir
Iceland65.590° N 16.899° W
Alexander Grebenkov · CC BY 3.0 The landscape is the remains of a lava lake. A little over two thousand years ago a large eruption along the Þrengslaborgir and Lúdentsborgir crater row to the east sent lava flooding into this hollow, where it pooled over marshy, waterlogged ground. Steam from the boiling wetland forced its way up through the molten rock, and around each vent the lava chilled into a pipe or column, some as thin as a drainpipe and others several metres across.
Did you know? In the weeks before Christmas the lava field is presented as the home of the Icelandic Yule Lads, the mischievous troll-like figures of local folklore.
08 Fjaðrárgljúfur
Iceland63.777° N 18.176° W
Jerzy Strzelecki · CC BY-SA 3.0 The rock is palagonite, a tuff formed when volcanoes erupted under glacial ice during the cold phases of the Ice Age, and is thought to be about two million years old. The canyon itself is far younger. At the end of the last glaciation, roughly nine thousand years ago, a lake dammed behind a band of harder rock drained through it, and the rushing meltwater tore a deep channel into the soft palagonite.
Did you know? In 2024 the eastern part of the canyon was formally designated a protected area under Icelandic law.
09 Almannagjá
Iceland · 37 km from Selfoss64.261° N 21.122° W
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 The chasm is also the backdrop to the beginning of Icelandic history. From 930 until 1798 the Althing, the general assembly of the island's free men, met each summer at Þingvellir — the name means "assembly plains".
Did you know? Between 1618 and 1749 women convicted of crimes such as infanticide were drowned at Drekkingarhylur, a deep pool of the Öxará beside the gorge.
10 Silfra
Iceland · 36.3 km from Selfoss64.255° N 21.119° W
Image by globenwein from Pixabay The fissure lies in the Þingvellir valley, a rift along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where the two plates drift apart by about two centimetres a year. The accumulated strain is released in larger earthquakes roughly once a decade, and each one can widen old cracks or open new ones; Silfra is among the largest and deepest of them. Rocks that fell into the gap have jammed together into underwater caves and chambers.
Did you know? The lava that the fissure cuts through flowed from volcanoes about 9,000 years ago.
11 Dyrhólaey
Iceland63.404° N 19.117° W
Image by CapDeXai66 from Pixabay The view from the top is one of the finest on the south coast. To the east lie the long beach of Reynisfjara and the basalt sea stacks of Reynisdrangar standing in the surf; to the north, the ice cap of Mýrdalsjökull; to the west, the coast runs away towards Selfoss, depending on the weather. Below, the Atlantic breaks against the arch and the cliff faces.
Did you know? Offshore stands the sea stack Háidrangur, 56 metres high and sheer-sided, first climbed in 1893.
12 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.
Did you know? Scenes of Interstellar and Batman Begins were filmed on Svínafellsjökull, one of the volcano's outlet glaciers.
13 Laki Craters (Lakagígar)
Lakagígar
Iceland64.067° N 18.230° W
Image by jackmac34 from Pixabay The eruption began on 8 June 1783, when a fissure opened through the mountain Laki — a block of older tuff that the crater row cuts in two and that gave the whole site its name. Over eight months, until 7 February 1784, it poured out about 14 cubic kilometres of basalt lava in a series of pulses, with lava fountains estimated at 800 to 1,400 metres high.
Did you know? Benjamin Franklin suspected an Icelandic volcano behind the strange dry fog of 1783, though he wrongly blamed Hekla.
14 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.
Did you know? Legend says the glacier is named after Torfi, who fled a plague with his household into the highlands.
15 Látrabjarg
Iceland65.497° N 24.397° W
Hansueli Krapf · CC BY-SA 4.0 In summer the air along the edge is thick with birds. Guillemots and razorbills pack the narrow ledges, and Látrabjarg holds a very large share of the world's razorbills; kittiwakes and gannets wheel below. The birds everyone comes for, though, are the puffins, which dig their burrows in the turf right at the top of the cliff and are famously unbothered by people lying quietly a few metres away.
Did you know? Egg-gathering on ropes was a deadly trade: two men were killed collecting eggs on the cliff in 1926 alone.
16 Askja
Iceland65.030° N 16.750° W
User Wolfgangbeyer on de.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 What draws the eye is a set of calderas nested one inside another. The oldest and widest is a basin of about 50 square kilometres left by a prehistoric eruption; within it lies the main caldera, roughly eight kilometres wide. Then, in March 1875, a violent eruption lasting about seventeen hours threw out close to two cubic kilometres of tephra, and over the following months the ground sank to form a new hollow about five kilometres across.
Did you know? In July 2014 a section of caldera wall about a kilometre wide slid into Öskjuvatn, raising tsunami waves that surged as far as neighbouring Víti.
17 Ásbyrgi
Iceland66.014° N 16.503° W
Catherine Christopoulou · CC BY-SA 4.0 Its shape looks so deliberate that Norse tradition explained it as a hoofprint. According to the legend, Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir touched down here with one foot, and the canyon has been known as Sleipnir's footprint ever since. Geology tells a more violent story.
Did you know? Eyjan, the rock island splitting the canyon, is about 250 metres wide as well as some 25 metres high.
18 Jökulsárgljúfur
Iceland65.929° N 16.537° W
Bernd Thaller from Graz, Austria · CC BY 2.0 The canyon is young by geological standards. Between about nine and eight thousand years ago, volcanic fissures nearby poured out thick sheets of lava. After the last Ice Age, as the great Vatnajökull ice cap far to the south retreated, sudden glacial outburst floods released by eruptions beneath the ice surged down the river with enormous force, cutting through the lava layers in a matter of days rather than millennia.
Did you know? Local tradition holds that the horseshoe-shaped gorge of Ásbyrgi is the hoofprint of Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir.
19 Raufarhólshellir
Iceland · 19.6 km from Selfoss63.940° N 21.396° W
Markus Trienke · CC BY-SA 2.0 What makes the tube memorable is how much of the sky gets in. Near the entrance the roof has collapsed in several places, and these skylights drop shafts of daylight onto heaps of fallen basalt; in winter snow drifts in through them and ice builds up into stalagmites and glassy sculptures on the floor.
Did you know? In 1971 the English Shepton Mallet Caving Club mounted an expedition that was among the first systematic explorations of Iceland's caves.
20 Vestrahorn
Iceland64.280° N 14.940° W
Image by SissiTer from Pixabay The drama is geological. Most Icelandic mountains are built of basalt, but Vestrahorn is one of the few made largely of gabbro, a coarse-grained rock that cooled slowly deep underground, together with granophyre. 6 million years and were pushed into older basalt; erosion has since stripped the softer cover away and carved the harder rock into the sharp pinnacles visible today.
Did you know? According to the settlement tradition, Hrollaugur, brother of the Norman founder Rollo, first landed at Reykjavík but found his high-seat pillars washed ashore by Vestrahorn and settled here.
21 Þríhnúkagígur
Iceland · 19.9 km from Reykjavík63.998° N 21.699° W
Uaiecs · CC BY 3.0 The crater belongs to the Brennisteinsfjöll volcanic system and forms the north-eastern member of a small group of craters, the Þríhnúkar. It has not erupted for about 4,000 years. At the surface the vent is only around 4 by 4 m, but beneath it the cavity widens into a space of roughly 150,000 cubic metres, with a floor around 48 by 60 m, comparable in size to a football pitch.
Did you know? The descent from the rim to the floor of the chamber takes about three minutes in the suspended cable lift.
22 Stuðlagil
Iceland65.163° N 15.307° W
ArniGael · CC BY-SA 4.0 The columns are the product of thick lava flows that cooled slowly and contracted evenly, cracking into regular polygons, and in Stuðlagil they appear in unusual variety – straight colonnades, tilted bundles and rosettes – with dark rock against bright moss on the rims. The colour of the river is the other half of the spectacle.
Did you know? Photographer Einar Páll Svavarsson gave the canyon its name, from stuðlaberg, the Icelandic word for columnar basalt.
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 natural wonders in Iceland?
- On our list, Strokkur ranks first, followed by Kirkjufell and Hverfjall.
- Why does Iceland have so many volcanoes?
- Iceland lies on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where two tectonic plates move apart, and above a mantle hotspot that supplies extra magma. This combination makes it one of the most volcanically active places on Earth, with an eruption every few years on average.
- What happened in the Laki eruption of 1783?
- For eight months a fissure of more than a hundred craters poured out lava and huge quantities of sulphurous gas. The poisoning of pasture and livestock caused a famine that killed about a fifth of Iceland's population, and a haze spread across Europe.
- Can you swim between two continents at Silfra?
- Silfra is a water-filled fissure in the rift valley at Þingvellir, between the North American and Eurasian plates. The boundary there is a wide zone of cracks rather than a single line, but divers in Silfra are swimming within the gap between the two plates.
- How many natural wonders are on this list in Iceland?
- The list covers 22 natural wonders.