The Most Beautiful Places in Austurland
7 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Austurland are Jökulsárlón, Vatnajökull and Svartifoss. The list covers 7 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
East and southeast Iceland are among the oldest parts of the island, built from lava flows that piled up layer on layer and were later cut by glaciers into steep fjords, mountains and canyons. In the south of the region, Vatnajökull, the largest ice cap in Iceland, still covers the volcanoes beneath it and feeds outlet glaciers that reach almost to the sea. The landscape here is shaped as much by ice as by fire, which gives it a different character from the volcanic southwest.
At the edge of Vatnajökull, Jökulsárlón is a glacial lagoon where icebergs break off the glacier, drift toward the ocean and wash up on the black sand beach nearby. In the national park on the glacier's southern flank, Svartifoss falls over a curtain of dark basalt columns that hang like organ pipes. Vestrahorn, a jagged mountain of gabbro, rises behind black sand dunes on the Stokksnes peninsula.
Inland in the east, Hengifoss drops into a gorge where thin red layers of clay show between basalt lavas, recording quiet periods between ancient eruptions. In the Jökuldalur valley, Stuðlagil reveals a canyon lined with basalt columns along a blue-green glacial river, a sight that became widely known only in recent years.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jökulsárlón | Lagoon | |
| 2 | Vatnajökull | Glacier | |
| 3 | Svartifoss | Waterfall | |
| 4 | Öræfajökull | Volcano | |
| 5 | Hengifoss | Waterfall | |
| 6 | Vestrahorn | Mountain | |
| 7 | Stuðlagil | Canyon |
01 Jökulsárlón
Iceland64.076° N 16.230° W
Kenny Muir · CC BY 2.0 Jökulsárlón is a lake that did not exist a century ago. Breiðamerkurjökull, an outlet glacier of the vast Vatnajökull ice cap, began to retreat from its moraine at the end of the nineteenth century, and in the 1930s meltwater began to pool in the hollow it left behind.
Did you know? The dark bands striping many of the icebergs are layers of volcanic ash from ancient eruptions, trapped in the ice for centuries.
02 Vatnajökull
Iceland64.400° N 16.800° W
Image by photovicky from Pixabay Vatnajökull is the great ice cap of south-east Iceland and the largest glacier in Europe outside the Arctic, covering more than 7,000 square kilometres. The ice averages around 380 metres thick and reaches about 950 metres at its deepest, holding some 3,000 cubic kilometres of water.
Did you know? About 8,600 years ago Bárðarbunga fed the Þjórsárhraun, thought to be the largest lava flow on Earth since the last Ice Age, with a volume of over 20 cubic kilometres.
03 Svartifoss
Iceland64.028° N 16.975° W
Andreas Tille · CC BY-SA 4.0 Svartifoss earns its name — "black falls" — from the wall of dark basalt columns that hem it in on both sides, and those columns are the actual reason to come.
Did you know? Horizontal grooves spaced 5 to 20 cm apart run across the column faces, each marking a pulse in the cooling of the lava.
04 Öræfajökull
Iceland64.025° N 16.642° W
Ferdinand Stöhr fellowferdi · CC0 Öræfajökull is the roof of Iceland. This ice-capped volcano rises straight from the narrow coastal plain at the southern tip of Vatnajökull, and on the rim of its summit caldera stands Hvannadalshnúkur, at about 2,110 metres the highest peak in the country.
Did you know? The district later took the name Öræfi, which came to mean "wasteland" after the eruption.
05 Hengifoss
Iceland · 30.1 km from Egilsstaðir65.095° N 14.889° W
Image by benralexander from Pixabay Hengifoss drops about 128 metres from the edge of the highland plateau into a deep, round bowl of rock, and what makes it unforgettable is the wall behind it: dark basalt banded with thin, brick-red stripes, layer upon layer, like the pages of a geological book standing on end.
Did you know? The gorge is shared by two farms, privately owned Melar and state-owned Hjarðarból; the path and car park lie on Melar's land.
06 Vestrahorn
Iceland64.280° N 14.940° W
Image by SissiTer from Pixabay Vestrahorn is one of those mountains that seem designed for the shoreline in front of them. On the Stokksnes peninsula in south-east Iceland, a jagged wall of dark peaks about 454 metres high rises almost straight from a plain of black sand, and the dunes at its foot are tufted with pale grass.
Did you know? The tholeiitic basalt on the eastern flank, about 8 million years old, is the oldest rock around Hornafjörður.
07 Stuðlagil
Iceland65.163° N 15.307° W
ArniGael · CC BY-SA 4.0 For most of its history Stuðlagil was barely seen at all. The canyon lies in Jökuldalur in East Iceland, where the glacial river Jökulsá á Dal – known locally as Jökla – runs between walls of basalt columns.
Did you know? The diverted water feeds a 690-megawatt power station that runs the Alcoa aluminium smelter at Reyðarfjörður.
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 places in Austurland?
- On our list, Jökulsárlón ranks first, followed by Vatnajökull and Svartifoss.
- Why are there icebergs at Jökulsárlón?
- The lagoon formed as the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier retreated, and ice keeps breaking off its front into the water. The icebergs drift slowly toward the sea through a short channel.
- How are basalt columns formed?
- Basalt columns form when a thick lava flow cools slowly and contracts, cracking into regular, mostly six-sided pillars. Svartifoss and Stuðlagil are among the best examples in Iceland.
- What is the largest glacier in Iceland?
- Vatnajökull is the largest glacier in Iceland and covers several active volcanoes. It lies within Vatnajökull National Park.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Austurland?
- In our collection, the places in Austurland are most often glaciers (2), waterfalls (2), mountains (1) and canyons and gorges (1).
- How many places are on this list in Austurland?
- The list covers 7 places.