The Most Beautiful Places in Iceland
41 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Iceland are Jökulsárlón, Kirkjufell and Seljalandsfoss. The list covers 41 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Iceland is a young island built by volcanoes on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart above a hotspot. Fresh basalt lies in layers that rivers cut into easily, glaciers cover about a tenth of the land and feed powerful rivers, and geothermal heat breaks through the surface as geysers and hot springs. The result is a country of waterfalls, ice and steam within a few hours of each other.
The waterfalls come in every form. Gullfoss drops in two steps into a narrow canyon of the Hvítá, Seljalandsfoss can be walked behind, and Skógafoss falls in a single broad curtain from a former sea cliff. In the north, Goðafoss spreads in a horseshoe over basalt, while at Hraunfossar water seeps out of a lava field and pours into the river in dozens of small streams. Nearby, in Haukadalur, Strokkur erupts every few minutes.
Ice and lava shape the rest. Vatnajökull is the largest ice cap in Iceland, and at Jökulsárlón icebergs calved from one of its outlet glaciers drift through a lagoon toward the sea. Hverfjall near Lake Mývatn is a near-perfect ring of black tephra, Kirkjufell rises as a steep, symmetrical cone over the Snæfellsnes coast, and Hvítserkur is a basalt stack in the sea that looks like a beast drinking. The Blue Lagoon fills a lava field near Grindavík with milky-blue geothermal water rich in silica.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jökulsárlón | Lagoon | |
| 2 | Kirkjufell | Summit | |
| 3 | Seljalandsfoss | Waterfall | |
| 4 | Landmannalaugar | Protected area | |
| 5 | Stuðlagil | Canyon | |
| 6 | Reynisfjara | Beach | |
| 7 | Vestrahorn | Mountain | |
| 8 | Goðafoss | Waterfall | |
| 9 | Blue Lagoon, Iceland | Thermal bath | |
| 10 | Strokkur | Geyser | |
| 11 | Hverfjall | Volcano | |
| 12 | Vatnajökull | Glacier | |
| 13 | Skógafoss | Waterfall | |
| 14 | Hvítserkur | Stack | |
| 15 | Hraunfossar | Waterfall | |
| 16 | Snæfellsjökull | Volcano | |
| 17 | Gullfoss | Waterfall | |
| 18 | Hallgrímskirkja | Church building | |
| 19 | Dynjandi | Waterfall | |
| 20 | Reynisdrangar | Stack | |
| 21 | Dimmuborgir | Rock formation | |
| 22 | Dettifoss | Waterfall | |
| 23 | Svartifoss | Waterfall | |
| 24 | Fjaðrárgljúfur | Canyon | |
| 25 | Harpa | Theatre building | |
| 26 | Almannagjá | Canyon | |
| 27 | Silfra | Karst spring | |
| 28 | Dyrhólaey | Natural arch | |
| 29 | Öræfajökull | Volcano | |
| 30 | Laki Craters (Lakagígar) | Volcano |
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 Kirkjufell
Iceland64.948° N 23.311° W
Steven Diaz stevendiazphoto · CC0 Kirkjufell, "Church Mountain", rises 463 metres straight out of the shoreline on the north coast of the Snæfellsnes peninsula in western Iceland.
Did you know? Icelandic geologists point to it as an unusually clear record of erosion by glaciers and glacial rivers over roughly the last million years.
03 Seljalandsfoss
Iceland63.615° N 19.988° W
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Seljalandsfoss is the waterfall people walk behind. The Seljalandsá river, fed from the ice of the volcano-glacier Eyjafjallajökull, drops about 60 metres from the lip of an old cliff in south Iceland, and the rock face behind the curtain has been hollowed into a shallow cave.
Did you know? Nearby Gljúfrabúi drops about 40 metres into a deep chasm, is fed by a spring-sourced river, and is protected as a natural monument.
04 Landmannalaugar
Iceland63.989° N 19.064° W
Image by jovanel from Pixabay Few landscapes in Europe look as improbable as the mountains around Landmannalaugar, in the Fjallabak Nature Reserve of Iceland's southern highlands.
Did you know? The Iceland Touring Association built its first shelter here in 1951; the mountain hut that stands today dates from 1969.
05 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.
06 Reynisfjara
Iceland63.405° N 19.064° W
Image by Michalpstr from Pixabay Reynisfjara is a black beach on Iceland's south coast, just west of the village of Vík í Mýrdal, and it is one of the most dramatic places on the whole island to watch the North Atlantic. The sand and pebbles are volcanic, dark as charcoal,, and the Atlantic swell breaks on them with full force.
Did you know? The cliffs of Reynisfjall hold large puffin breeding colonies, and the birds can be seen along the headland in summer.
07 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.
08 Goðafoss
Iceland · 25.3 km from Akureyri65.683° N 17.550° W
Image by NUNZG from Pixabay Goðafoss is not the highest or the most powerful waterfall in Iceland, but it may be the most perfectly shaped. The river Skjálfandafljót drops about 12 metres over a curved rim roughly 30 metres wide, splitting into broad white curtains around rocky outcrops before gathering again in a deep blue-green pool.
Did you know? A short way downstream, a second, lower waterfall called Geitafoss drops within the same gorge.
09 Blue Lagoon, Iceland
Bláa lónið
Iceland · 16.4 km from Keflavík63.879° N 22.446° W
Image by dassel from Pixabay The Blue Lagoon is not a lake shaped by nature but an accident of engineering that turned out to be beautiful.
Did you know? A psoriasis clinic opened beside the lagoon in 1994, and studies found that bathing combined with UVB light therapy markedly eased symptoms.
10 Strokkur
Iceland64.313° N 20.301° W
Image by Hans from Pixabay Strokkur, "the churn", is the geyser that keeps its promises. Every six to ten minutes, in the Haukadalur geothermal field of south-west Iceland, the blue dome of water in its basin swells, trembles and bursts into a column of boiling water and steam, usually 15 to 20 m high and occasionally twice that.
Did you know? Strokkur does not always erupt once: it can fire anything from a single burst up to six in rapid succession, all fed from the same bubble trap.
11 Hverfjall
Iceland65.604° N 16.872° W
Stephen · CC BY 2.0 Hverfjall is a bare, perfectly round bowl of dark grey-black volcanic debris rising from the flat lava country east of Lake Mývatn in north Iceland.
Did you know? A long dispute over whether the crater should be called Hverfjall or Hverfell was settled with Hverfjall as the official map name and Hverfell in brackets.
12 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.
13 Skógafoss
Iceland63.530° N 19.514° W
Image by falco from Pixabay Skógafoss doesn't sit on a lava field or a fault line — it sits on what used to be the edge of Iceland itself. After the last Ice Age, as the ice sheets melted and the crust rebounded from their weight, Iceland's south coast retreated roughly five kilometres seawards, leaving a line of old sea cliffs standing inland.
Did you know? A ring said to come from Þrasi's treasure chest was given to the local church as a door handle and is now kept in the Skógar museum.
14 Hvítserkur
Iceland65.606° N 20.635° W
Image by susnpics from Pixabay Hvítserkur is a 15-metre basalt sea stack standing in the shallows off the eastern shore of the Vatnsnes peninsula in north-west Iceland.
Did you know? According to legend, the troll had come over from the Strandir coast of the Westfjords, enraged by the ringing bells of the convent at Þingeyrar.
15 Hraunfossar
Iceland64.703° N 20.980° W
Image by SandraLina from Pixabay Hraunfossar is a waterfall without a river above it. Along roughly 900 metres to a kilometre of the north bank of the Hvítá in Borgarfjörður, west Iceland, water simply appears out of the edge of an old lava flow and spills over the dark rock into the river in hundreds of small cascades, veils and threads.
Did you know? The same lava field holds Víðgelmir, Iceland's largest lava tube, about 1.6 km long with passages up to some 16 m high and wide.
16 Snæfellsjökull
Iceland64.807° N 23.776° W
Anjali Kiggal · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the far western tip of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, a single cone of ice-capped rock rises to 1,446 metres straight from the sea.
17 Gullfoss
Iceland64.326° N 20.121° W
Image by khj800 from Pixabay Gullfoss looks like a natural monument, but it survived as one only because a farmer's daughter refused to let it be sold.
Did you know? The Hvítá, whose name means white river for its pale glacial silt, flows about 40 kilometres from the glacial lake Hvítárvatn at the foot of Langjökull before reaching the falls.
18 Hallgrímskirkja
Iceland · 0.5 km from Reykjavík64.142° N 21.927° W
Image by Michelle-Maria from Pixabay Hallgrímskirkja stands on the hilltop of Skólavörðuholt above central Reykjavík and is seen from almost everywhere in the city. 5 m it is the largest church in Iceland and one of the tallest buildings in the country.
Did you know? The nave was consecrated on 26 October 1986, the anniversary of Hallgrímur Pétursson's death, in the year Reykjavík celebrated 200 years as a town.
19 Dynjandi
Iceland · 39.1 km from Ísafjörður65.733° N 23.199° W
Image by jackmac34 from Pixabay Dynjandi does not fall so much as spread.
Did you know? Icelandic sources consider the alternative name Fjallfoss a mistake, though that name is still in common use.
20 Reynisdrangar
Iceland63.400° N 19.032° W
Jakub Fryš · CC BY-SA 4.0 Reynisdrangar are a cluster of dark basalt sea stacks standing off the southern tip of Reynisfjall, the steep headland just west of Vík í Mýrdal on Iceland's south coast.
Did you know? Great skuas nest in the area alongside the puffins and fulmars of the cliffs.
21 Dimmuborgir
Iceland65.590° N 16.899° W
Alexander Grebenkov · CC BY 3.0 Dimmuborgir looks less like a lava field than a ruined city: a sunken maze of black towers, arches, hollow chambers and leaning pillars on the eastern side of Lake Mývatn in north Iceland.
Did you know? Dimmuborgir was declared a protected natural monument in 2011, covering about 423 hectares.
22 Dettifoss
Iceland65.822° N 16.388° W
Markus Trienke · CC BY-SA 2.0 Dettifoss is less a waterfall than a collapse of the landscape. The Jökulsá á Fjöllum, a glacial river born under Vatnajökull, arrives across a bare plateau of grey gravel and lava and drops 44 metres over a lip about 100 metres wide into the head of the Jökulsárgljúfur canyon.
Did you know? The Jökulsá á Fjöllum that feeds it is Iceland's second-longest river at 206 km, draining the country's largest basin of about 7,380 square kilometres.
23 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.
24 Fjaðrárgljúfur
Iceland63.777° N 18.176° W
Jerzy Strzelecki · CC BY-SA 3.0 Fjaðrárgljúfur is a narrow, serpentine canyon in south-east Iceland, about two kilometres long and up to a hundred metres deep, cut into the green flank of the hills just west of Kirkjubæjarklaustur.
Did you know? Annual visitor numbers almost doubled in a single year, from about 150,000 in 2017 to about 282,000 in 2018.
25 Harpa
Iceland · 0.8 km from Reykjavík64.150° N 21.933° W
Image by dassel from Pixabay Harpa rises on the old harbour front of Reykjavík like a block of crystal washed up on the quay.
Did you know? The building cost about €164 million, rises 43 metres and contains roughly 28,000 square metres of floor space.
26 Almannagjá
Iceland · 37 km from Selfoss64.261° N 21.122° W
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Almannagjá is a long fissure in the lava plain of Þingvellir in south-west Iceland, where the ground has been pulled apart along the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates.
Did you know? The plates on either side drift apart by around two centimetres a year, and the last major burst of rifting here came in the spring of 1789.
27 Silfra
Iceland · 36.3 km from Selfoss64.255° N 21.119° W
Image by globenwein from Pixabay Silfra is a crack in the Earth filled with some of the clearest fresh water anywhere: a narrow flooded fissure at the edge of Lake Þingvallavatn in south-west Iceland, opened by the slow separation of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates.
Did you know? Before earthquakes in 1789 changed its water level and currents, Silfra was a common fishing spot, according to an account written in 1863.
28 Dyrhólaey
Iceland63.404° N 19.117° W
Image by CapDeXai66 from Pixabay Dyrhólaey is a headland of dark volcanic rock rising about 120 m above the black sands of Iceland's south coast. It was once an island, formed by an eruption in the sea roughly 100,000 years ago, and the name — "door-hill island" — comes from the great arch that the ocean has cut through its seaward end.
Did you know? The present lighthouse of 1927 was designed by Guðjón Samúelsson, the state architect who also designed Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík.
29 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.
30 Laki Craters (Lakagígar)
Lakagígar
Iceland64.067° N 18.230° W
Image by jackmac34 from Pixabay Lakagígar, the Craters of Laki, is a line of some 130 volcanic cones and vents stretching about 25 km across the highlands of southern Iceland, between the ice caps of Mýrdalsjökull and Vatnajökull.
Did you know? The severe winter of 1783–84 delayed congressmen travelling to Annapolis to ratify the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War.
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 Iceland?
- On our list, Jökulsárlón ranks first, followed by Kirkjufell and Seljalandsfoss.
- Why does Iceland have so many waterfalls?
- Heavy rainfall and glacial meltwater feed many rivers, which flow off a young landscape of layered basalt with steep edges and old sea cliffs. The rivers have had little time to wear these steps down, so they drop over them as waterfalls.
- Why is the Blue Lagoon blue?
- The geothermal water is rich in silica, which forms tiny suspended particles that reflect blue light. The milky colour comes from the same silica, along with algae and other minerals.
- How often does Strokkur erupt?
- Strokkur erupts every few minutes, usually throwing water 15 to 20 metres high and sometimes higher. It is one of the most reliable geysers in the world.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Iceland?
- In our collection, the places in Iceland are most often waterfalls (11), volcanoes (7), canyons and gorges (5) and glaciers (4).
- How many places are on this list in Iceland?
- The list covers 41 places.