The Most Beautiful Volcanoes in Europe
16 places in 5 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful volcanoes in Europe are Mount Vesuvius (Italy), Teide (Spain) and Mount Etna (Italy). The list covers 16 volcanoes in 5 countries. Iceland has the most, with 7. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Europe's volcanoes sit on three very different kinds of fire. In the Mediterranean, the African plate pushes north beneath Italy and feeds Vesuvius, Etna and the Aeolian Islands. In the Atlantic, Iceland straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the sea floor is pulling apart above a hotspot, and the Azores and Canaries rise from the ocean in the same way. Add the old giants of the Caucasus, and the continent offers every volcanic form, from fissures and craters to towering stratovolcanoes.
Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD and still looms over the Bay of Naples. Etna, on Sicily, is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, and little Stromboli has been throwing out glowing bursts every few minutes for millennia. Teide on Tenerife is the highest point in Spain, and Mount Pico in the Azores is the highest in Portugal. Mount Kazbek, a glaciated extinct cone in Georgia, is tied in legend to the chained Prometheus.
Iceland shows how volcanoes are made and unmade. Hverfjall is a clean ring of black tephra above Lake Mývatn, Askja holds a deep caldera lake beside the warm crater of Víti, and the Laki Craters trace the fissure of the catastrophic eruption of 1783. At Þríhnúkagígur, visitors can descend into the emptied magma chamber of a dormant volcano. In the Atlantic islands, Capelinhos on Faial added new land to the Azores in 1957 and 1958, and Lanzarote's Montañas del Fuego are a landscape of cinder cones from the eruptions of the 1730s.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Vesuvius | Volcano | Italy | |
| 2 | Teide | Volcano | Spain | |
| 3 | Mount Etna | Volcano | Italy | |
| 4 | Hverfjall | Volcano | Iceland | |
| 5 | Stromboli | Volcano | Italy | ✓ |
| 6 | Vulcano | Volcano | Italy | ✓ |
| 7 | Snæfellsjökull | Volcano | Iceland | |
| 8 | Mount Kazbek | Volcano | Georgia | |
| 9 | Mount Pico | Volcano | Portugal | |
| 10 | Capelinhos | Volcano | Portugal | |
| 11 | Öræfajökull | Volcano | Iceland | |
| 12 | Laki Craters (Lakagígar) | Volcano | Iceland | |
| 13 | Torfajökull | Volcano | Iceland | |
| 14 | Askja | Volcano | Iceland | |
| 15 | Þríhnúkagígur | Volcano | Iceland | |
| 16 | Montañas del Fuego | Volcano | Spain |
01 Mount Vesuvius
Vesuvio
Italy · 15.8 km from Naples40.823° N 14.429° E
Image by stostank from Pixabay The eruption of AD 79 buried Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabiae. A column of ash, pumice and gas rose to about 33 km, and pyroclastic surges swept down the slopes on the second day. The only eyewitness account to survive is a pair of letters by Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus, describing the black cloud over the bay and the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder, who had sailed across from Misenum to help and died at Stabiae. The word Plinian, used for violently explosive eruptions everywhere, comes from those letters.
Did you know? In March 1944, ash and hot tephra wrecked roughly 80 American B-25 bombers parked at an airfield a few kilometres from the volcano's eastern foot.
02 Teide
Spain28.273° N 16.644° W
Image by javierAlamo from Pixabay Teide is an active volcano. Its most recent eruption, in 1909, came from the Chinyero vent on the north-west rift, and the Narices del Teide eruption of 1798 poured lava from the flank of Pico Viejo. Because towns such as Garachico, Icod de los Vinos and Puerto de la Cruz lie below it, the United Nations listed it among its Decade Volcanoes for special study. For the Guanches, the island's people before the Spanish conquest of 1496, the mountain was sacred and the home of Guayota, a demon often pictured as a black dog; sailors on Columbus's first voyage in 1492 reported fire on the peak.
Did you know? In 1706 lava from the Montañas Negras vent on the north-west rift destroyed Garachico, then Tenerife's main port.
03 Mount Etna
Etna
Italy · 28.9 km from Catania37.751° N 14.993° E
Image by 19306 from Pixabay The Greeks and Romans placed the forge of Hephaestus, or Vulcan, beneath the mountain, and said Zeus had trapped the monster Typhon under it. The volcano's real history is no less dramatic. Thousands of years ago its eastern flank collapsed in a giant landslide, leaving the Valle del Bove, the Valley of the Ox, a great depression into which many recent lava flows have run; research published in 2006 dated the collapse to about 8,000 years ago. In 1669 the volcano's most destructive eruption in historical times sent lava through at least ten villages and up to the walls of Catania, where it poured around the city into the sea and filled the harbour.
Did you know? In 1992 engineers blew up a lava tube with explosives to divert a flow into an artificial channel away from the town of Zafferana.
04 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. Tephra from the eruption was spread over the whole Mývatn area. The southern side of the ring is less regular than the rest, a disruption thought to come from a landslide during the eruption.
Did you know? Craters of Hverfjall's type are rare worldwide; the only comparable example in the area is the older Lúdentarskál crater nearby.
05 Stromboli
Isola di Stromboli
Italy38.804° N 15.223° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Wolfgang_Hasselmann from Pixabay The most dramatic feature is the Sciara del Fuoco, the "stream of fire", a vast horseshoe-shaped scar on the northwestern flank left by repeated collapses of the cone over the last 13,000 years. Glowing material rolls down its black slope straight into the sea, and at night the view of incandescent blocks tumbling towards the water is one of the great natural spectacles of Europe. Around two kilometres offshore to the northeast stands Strombolicchio, a steep rock tower that is the eroded plug of an older volcanic vent, crowned by a small lighthouse.
Did you know? Jules Verne ended Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) with his explorers shot out of the volcano onto the slopes of Stromboli.
06 Vulcano
Isola di Vulcano
Italy38.404° N 14.966° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY 4.0 The main event is the Gran Cratere, the rim of the Fossa cone behind the port. Its last eruption, from 1888 to 1890, was studied by the geologist Giuseppe Mercalli, and the explosive, cannon-like blasts he described gave science the term "Vulcanian eruption". A marked trail climbs about 390 m to the rim, where fumaroles steam around the crater — sulphur was mined on the island from Roman times until the late 19th century; allow roughly three hours there and back, start early in summer, and bring water.
07 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.
08 Mount Kazbek
Georgia42.697° N 44.519° E
Rafał Kozubek · CC BY-SA 3.0 The upper mountain is wrapped in ice. Several glaciers flow from the summit dome — the Gergeti on the south-east, the Devdoraki creeping down the north-eastern slope into a narrow gorge, and others on every side. The Devdoraki is also a reminder that the mountain is alive: a collapse of ice and rock in 2014 sent a deadly debris flow into the valley below. From the south the classic view frames Kazbek behind the small fourteenth-century Gergeti Trinity Church, which sits alone on a green shoulder at about 2,170 metres above the town of Stepantsminda — a composition of stone chapel, grass and snow that has become one of the defining images of the Caucasus.
Did you know? A 2019 expedition placed a GPS receiver on the summit for the first time and measured its height as 5,053.9 metres, accurate to millimetres.
09 Mount Pico
Montanha do Pico
Portugal · 22.6 km from Horta38.469° N 28.399° W
José Luís Ávila Silveira/Pedro Noronha e Costa · Public domain Pico is a young stratovolcano, built up within the last 230,000 years, and part of its slopes are younger still. At the top lies Pico Alto, a crater about 500 metres across and 30 metres deep, from which a small secondary cone, Piquinho or Pico Pequeno, climbs another 70 metres to form the true summit. The volcano is dormant rather than extinct: in historical times flank eruptions sent lava flows down to the sea in 1562–1564, 1718 and from July to December 1720, and gas still escapes near the summit. Since 1972 the upper mountain has been protected as a nature reserve covering about 13.4 km², and an atmospheric observatory has operated at 2,225 metres since 1998.
Did you know? The nearest higher summit is Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma in the Canary Islands, about 1,450 km away.
10 Capelinhos
Vulcão dos Capelinhos
Portugal · 17.9 km from Horta38.601° N 28.832° W
Image by Comanche0 from Pixabay The activity began offshore. After some two hundred earthquakes in mid-September 1957, the sea about a kilometre beyond the lighthouse began to boil, and on 27 September an eruption broke the surface a few hundred metres off the point. Within weeks a small island had risen from the water; locals gave it several names, among them Ilha Nova, "the New Island". A handful of journalists and a boat pilot landed on it long enough to plant a Portuguese flag before it collapsed back into the sea at the end of October. A second cone formed in November and was soon joined to Faial by an isthmus. Explosive phases alternated with lava flows until the last projectiles were seen on 24 October 1958.
Did you know? Whale spotters on the cliff above the lighthouse were the first to see the sea churning on the morning of 27 September 1957 and raised the alarm.
11 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.
12 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. The lava covered some 600 square kilometres and flowed down the valleys of the Skaftá and Hverfisfljót rivers, burying farms. Far worse were the gases: about 120 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide and some 8 million tonnes of fluorine.
Did you know? Weakened monsoons after the eruption brought low Nile floods, and the famine in Egypt in 1784 is thought to have killed about a sixth of its population.
13 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.
14 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. Water filled it, and the result is Öskjuvatn, a deep-blue lake roughly 220 metres deep, the second deepest in Iceland, lying some 50 metres below the floor of the surrounding caldera and frozen for much of the year.
Did you know? The 1875 eruption ranks among the two or three most powerful explosive eruptions in Iceland since settlement, after Hekla in 1104 and Öræfajökull in the 14th century.
15 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. Below the floor, volcanic conduits continue down to a depth of about 200 m. Strictly speaking it is not a magma chamber in the deep geological sense but the cavity of the eruption channel beneath the crater, from which the magma drained away rather than solidifying in place.
Did you know? Its walls are streaked with red, yellow and orange mineral colours against black basalt, giving the cavity the look of a stained-glass cathedral.
16 Montañas del Fuego
Monumento Natural de Las Montañas del Fuego
Spain · 20.6 km from Arrecife29.000° N 13.746° W
H. Zell · CC BY-SA 3.0 The mountains were born in one of the longest and largest basaltic eruptions in recorded history. On 1 September 1730 the ground opened near Caldera de los Cuervos, and for almost six years, until April 1736, a chain of vents along a fissure some 18 kilometres long built 32 new volcanoes. The parish priest of Yaiza, Andrés Lorenzo Curbelo, kept a detailed account of the first months. When the activity ended, lava had buried about a quarter of the island, including its most fertile farmland and eleven villages. The Fire Mountains belong to the later phases of that eruption, when the activity moved east through the aligned craters of the Calderas Quemadas towards Montaña de Timanfaya.
Did you know? The El Diablo restaurant, designed by César Manrique, grills food over a well about five metres deep that channels the natural heat of the 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 volcanoes in Europe?
- On our list, Mount Vesuvius (Italy) ranks first, followed by Teide (Spain) and Mount Etna (Italy).
- Which country has the most volcanoes in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Iceland (7), Italy (4) and Portugal (2).
- When did Vesuvius destroy Pompeii?
- In 79 AD an eruption of Vesuvius buried Pompeii, Herculaneum and other towns under ash and pyroclastic flows. Pliny the Younger left an eyewitness account, which gave the name Plinian to this type of eruption.
- What happened in the Laki eruption of 1783?
- A fissure in southern Iceland erupted for eight months, pouring out lava and huge amounts of toxic gas. The fluorine poisoning and haze killed much of Iceland's livestock and led to a famine, while the haze spread across Europe.
- Can you go inside a volcano?
- At Þríhnúkagígur near Reykjavík, an open lift lowers visitors about 120 metres into the magma chamber of a volcano that last erupted some 4,000 years ago. It is one of the few places where such a chamber is accessible.
- How many volcanoes are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 16 volcanoes in 5 countries. Iceland has the most, with 7.
- Which is the highest of the volcanoes in Europe?
- Mount Kazbek (Georgia) is the highest on this list, at 5,033 metres.