The Most Beautiful Water Wonders in Iceland
16 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful water wonders in Iceland are Seljalandsfoss, Jökulsárlón and Goðafoss. The list covers 16 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Iceland is a young volcanic island sitting on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and almost everything about it makes waterfalls. Heavy Atlantic rain and snow feed ice caps such as Vatnajökull; meltwater rivers run off them in great volume; and the land beneath is built of stacked basalt lava flows that erode into steps, ledges and columns. Along the south coast, the old sea cliffs left behind as the land rose after the Ice Age give rivers a sheer drop all the way to the plain.
Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss are both on that former coastline: at the first you can walk behind the falling water, and the second is a broad curtain about 60 metres high. Gullfoss tumbles in two steps into a canyon on the Hvítá, Goðafoss forms a horseshoe on the Skjálfandafljót, and Dettifoss, in the north, carries more water than any other waterfall in Europe. Svartifoss falls over dark hexagonal basalt columns, Dynjandi spreads like a veil down a mountainside in the Westfjords, and Hraunfossar seeps out of a lava field in hundreds of small streams.
The coast completes the picture. At Jökulsárlón, icebergs calve from a glacier tongue and drift towards the sea, some washing up on a black beach. Reynisfjara's black sand faces the Reynisdrangar stacks, and in the north Hvítserkur stands in the shallows like an animal drinking.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Seljalandsfoss | Waterfall | |
| 2 | Jökulsárlón | Lagoon | |
| 3 | Goðafoss | Waterfall | |
| 4 | Skógafoss | Waterfall | |
| 5 | Hvítserkur | Stack | |
| 6 | Hraunfossar | Waterfall | |
| 7 | Gullfoss | Waterfall | |
| 8 | Dynjandi | Waterfall | |
| 9 | Reynisdrangar | Stack | |
| 10 | Dettifoss | Waterfall | |
| 11 | Svartifoss | Waterfall | |
| 12 | Reynisfjara | Beach | |
| 13 | Námafjall | Hot spring | |
| 14 | Hengifoss | Waterfall | |
| 15 | Aldeyjarfoss | Waterfall | |
| 16 | Háifoss | Waterfall |
01 Seljalandsfoss
Iceland63.615° N 19.988° W
Image by 12019 from Pixabay The cliff itself is a record of Iceland's past: it once marked the island's southern coastline, and today it stands inland above flat, green lowlands, an old sea cliff over which the meltwater of the highlands still finds its way.
Did you know? A large boulder called Franskanef stands in front of Gljúfrabúi's gorge and hides the base of that waterfall from view.
02 Jökulsárlón
Iceland64.076° N 16.230° W
Kenny Muir · CC BY 2.0 Its beauty lies in the ice. Blocks break off the glacier face and float out into the lagoon in shades from chalk white to glassy, ink-stained blue. They drift, turn over and slowly melt, and only when they have shrunk enough can they slip through the short channel to the Atlantic. On the black sand on either side of the outlet, stranded fragments glitter on the shore, a stretch now known as Diamond Beach.
Did you know? Whether an iceberg looks milky white or vivid blue depends on how much air is trapped inside the ice and how light passes through its crystals.
03 Goðafoss
Iceland · 25.3 km from Akureyri65.683° N 17.550° W
Image by NUNZG from Pixabay The name can be read two ways in Icelandic, as "waterfall of the gods" or "waterfall of the chieftain", and a famous story ties it to one of the turning points of Icelandic history. Around the year 1000, the chieftain Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði played the decisive part at the Althing in making Christianity the official religion of Iceland. According to the popular tale, on his way home he threw the carvings of his old gods into the falls.
Did you know? Place-name scholar Svavar Sigmundsson suggests the name may come from two crags at the falls that resemble pagan idols.
04 Skógafoss
Iceland63.530° N 19.514° W
Image by falco from Pixabay Local legend says a Viking settler named Þrasi Þórólfsson hid a chest of gold beneath the falls around the year 900, and that the first person to reach it would keep the treasure.
Did you know? From the top, a trail follows the river up to the Fimmvörðuháls pass between the Eyjafjallajökull and Mýrdalsjökull glaciers, and on down to Þórsmörk.
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 Hraunfossar
Iceland64.703° N 20.980° W
Image by SandraLina from Pixabay What makes the place so beautiful is the contrast of textures and colours. 5 °C — and crystal clear, filtered by the rock, while the Hvítá below runs milky turquoise with glacial silt. Between them lies the dark, broken edge of the lava, so each white rivulet stands out sharply before it vanishes into the blue-green current.
Did you know? Surtshellir and Stefánshellir, also in Hallmundarhraun, together form a lava cave system around 3.5 km long, the longest in Iceland.
07 Gullfoss
Iceland64.326° N 20.121° W
Image by khj800 from Pixabay The canyon Gullfoss drops into wasn't carved by the river running today — it was cut by catastrophic glacial floods at the end of the last Ice Age, meltwater events carrying far more volume and force than the Hvítá River carries now, leaving behind a channel oversized for the water that currently runs through it.
Did you know? The Icelandic state acquired the waterfall around 1940, and in 1979 Gullfoss and the surrounding land were formally protected.
08 Dynjandi
Iceland · 39.1 km from Ísafjörður65.733° N 23.199° W
Image by jackmac34 from Pixabay What makes the place memorable is that the big fall is only the top of a staircase. Below it the river keeps dropping through a chain of smaller falls, each with its own name — Háifoss, Úðafoss, Göngufoss, Hundafoss and Bæjarfoss among them — and the path from the shore climbs past them one by one. Each step gives a different angle on the great white apron above.
Did you know? An abandoned farm at the foot of the falls shares the name Dynjandi with the waterfall above it.
09 Reynisdrangar
Iceland63.400° N 19.032° W
Jakub Fryš · CC BY-SA 4.0 The stacks are what remains of a volcanic rock mass that the sea has cut away over a very long time, and the basalt around them shows the same origin: on Reynisfjara, the black-sand beach to the west, the cliff is made of tall hexagonal columns stepped like a stone organ, which visitors climb and sit on. Reynisfjara has repeatedly been listed among the most beautiful beaches in the world.
Did you know? The beach below the stacks stood in for Eastwatch-by-the-Sea in Game of Thrones and was also used in Darren Aronofsky's Noah.
10 Dettifoss
Iceland65.822° N 16.388° W
Markus Trienke · CC BY-SA 2.0 What makes the place remarkable is the setting as much as the drop. There is no green valley here, no framing forest: the river has cut a raw gorge into the plateau, and Dettifoss is the middle of three great falls on the same short stretch. About a kilometre upstream, Selfoss spills over a broad, ragged horseshoe of many small cascades; around two kilometres downstream, Hafragilsfoss plunges into a deeper, darker section of the canyon.
Did you know? The canyon below was carved by catastrophic glacial floods; the greatest may have peaked near 900,000 cubic metres per second, over four times the Amazon's average flow.
11 Svartifoss
Iceland64.028° N 16.975° W
Andreas Tille · CC BY-SA 4.0 The columns did more than decorate a hiking trail. When architect Guðjón Samúelsson was designing Reykjavík's Hallgrímskirkja church in the 1930s, Svartifoss's basalt organ-pipes gave him the church's stepped, fluted façade — a rare case of a national landmark tracing its design straight back to one specific waterfall. The same columnar motif turns up again in Samúelsson's National Theatre building in the capital.
Did you know? Columns snap off the cliff faster than the water can wear them down, so the pool below is littered with sharp-edged hexagonal fragments.
12 Reynisfjara
Iceland63.405° N 19.064° W
Image by Michalpstr from Pixabay Its landmark is the headland at the eastern edge of the beach in a cliff of basalt columns — hexagonal pillars packed together like organ pipes and stepped at the bottom into a natural staircase. At the foot of the cliff the sea has cut the cave Hálsanefshellir, whose walls are made of the same columns. Offshore stand the Reynisdrangar, sea stacks rising about 66 metres out of the surf.
Did you know? The Reynisdrangar sea stacks were once part of Reynisfjall and were cut off from the mountain by the battering of Atlantic waves.
13 Námafjall
Iceland65.636° N 16.823° W
Image by pvdberg from Pixabay The heat comes from below. Námafjall sits on a fissure swarm that runs from Öxarfjörður in the north through the Krafla volcano and south past the crater of Hverfjall, and the geothermal field is kept alive by intrusions of magma from the Krafla system. The ridge itself is cut by a dense network of fractures, and the strongest upflow lies along its eastern foot, where the fumaroles and mud pots are concentrated.
Did you know? Besides steam, the vents release hydrogen sulphide and deposit elemental sulphur, which gives the ground its yellow crusts.
14 Hengifoss
Iceland · 30.1 km from Egilsstaðir65.095° N 14.889° W
Image by benralexander from Pixabay The red bands are what remains of ancient soils and lake sediments laid down between successive lava flows late in the Tertiary period, when Iceland's climate was much warmer than today. In these layers geologists have found lignite and the compressed trunks and roots of trees, including conifers that could not survive in the present climate. The softer sediment beneath the hard basalt is part of the reason the falls formed here at all.
Did you know? The little birch and rowan grove inside the gorge covers only about half a hectare, hemmed in by cliffs yet still reachable by people and sheep.
15 Aldeyjarfoss
Iceland65.366° N 17.337° W
Image by LalouBLue from Pixabay The columns belong to the Bárðardalur lava, a flow roughly 9,000 years old that spread down the valley; the river drops over the edge where the lava meets older bedrock. As the lava cooled slowly, it contracted and cracked into the polygonal pillars now exposed in the walls of the gorge. The river has also cut into a pseudocrater — a cone formed when lava flowed over wet ground and steam burst up through it.
Did you know? The basalt columns framing the falls lie in the lower part of the lava sheet, where it meets the older bedrock of the valley.
16 Háifoss
Iceland64.208° N 19.686° W
Image by gabmarjan from Pixabay A few hundred metres away, a second waterfall named Granni — Icelandic for neighbour — falls about 101 metres into the same gorge, fed by another arm of the same river. Seen from the rim above, the two fall side by side, two white threads in a single gorge. The Fossá flows on to join the Þjórsá, Iceland's longest river. Háifoss was declared a protected natural monument in 2020.
Did you know? The valley floor is covered by lava from a Veiðivötn eruption over 3,000 years ago, which created countless pseudocraters as it spread across wet ground.
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 water wonders in Iceland?
- On our list, Seljalandsfoss ranks first, followed by Jökulsárlón and Goðafoss.
- Why does Iceland have so many waterfalls?
- Iceland combines high rainfall, large glaciers that feed powerful meltwater rivers, and a landscape of layered basalt and glacially carved cliffs, so rivers constantly meet abrupt drops in the terrain.
- Which waterfall in Iceland can you walk behind?
- Seljalandsfoss on the south coast has a path that runs behind the falling water, through a hollow in the old sea cliff.
- Why is Goðafoss called the waterfall of the gods?
- According to tradition, the lawspeaker Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði threw his statues of the Norse gods into the falls after Iceland adopted Christianity around the year 1000.
- How many lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches are on this list in Iceland?
- The list covers 16 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches.