The Most Beautiful Waterfalls in Europe

25 places in 10 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Rhine Falls

   Rheinfall

   Switzerland · 3.4 km from Schaffhausen47.677° N 8.616° E

   

   Two castles frame the scene. On the Zurich bank, Schloss Laufen sits right above the falls, with viewing platforms beside the falling water reached by steep stairways; on the Schaffhausen side the small Schlössli Wörth stands at the edge of the basin. Boats cross the pool below and take visitors out to the central rock. People have come to look since the Middle Ages, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the falls were a fixed stop on educational journeys through Switzerland.

   Did you know? At that 1921 low, a karst cave four to six metres deep was briefly exposed on the Zurich side.

   More about Rhine Falls →

2. 02 Seven Sisters (Geirangerfjord)

   Norway62.107° N 7.094° E

   

   Directly across the water stands a single fall, Friaren — the Suitor, also called Skageflåfossen — and local tradition joins the two in a story. The suitor, the tale goes, courted the sisters one by one and was turned down by all of them; in one version he still flirts with them across the fjord, in another, spurned for good, he took to drink, which is why his waterfall is said to have the shape of a bottle.

   Did you know? The name is said to come from the way the separate streams, seen from a distance, resemble the long loose hair of seven women.

   More about Seven Sisters (Geirangerfjord) →

3. 03 Seljalandsfoss

   Iceland63.615° N 19.988° W

   

   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? The cliff is capped with lava, while its lower part is palagonite tuff and breccia, volcanic rock built largely of ash and broken fragments.

   More about Seljalandsfoss →

4. 04 Plitvice Lakes National Park

   Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera

   Croatia44.880° N 15.616° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   That means the landscape people photograph is never finished; it's mid-construction, permanently. The famous shifts in the water's colour — turquoise, green, grey, depending on mineral content, sunlight angle and the season — come from exactly the same chemistry that's building the barriers, which is part of why the colour looks different every time someone visits rather than being some kind of seasonal trick.

   Did you know? Its Veliki slap, the Great Waterfall, plunges 78 metres.

   More about Plitvice Lakes National Park →

5. 05 Goðafoss

   Iceland · 25.3 km from Akureyri65.683° N 17.550° W

   

   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. Historians note that no early source records the gesture, and the story in its familiar form was published only in the late nineteenth century; Þorgeir's role in the conversion, however, is genuine.

   Did you know? It is among the most water-rich falls in Iceland, splitting into two main cascades and a varying number of smaller ones as the river rises and falls.

   More about Goðafoss →

6. 06 Skógafoss

   Iceland63.530° N 19.514° W

   

   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. Around 1600, three men are said to have tried: mid-rescue they thought their farm was on fire, ran back to find nothing wrong, returned to the falls, hooked the ring on the chest's lid — and watched the ring snap off as they pulled, sending the chest back into the pool. Nobody has produced the chest since, which is either proof it never existed or the best argument yet for a longer rope.

   Did you know? Spilling over a ledge about 25 metres wide, Skógafoss ranks among the largest waterfalls in Iceland.

   More about Skógafoss →

7. 07 Vøringsfossen

   Norway60.427° N 7.251° E

   

   Its fame began in 1821, when the astronomer Christopher Hansteen made his way to the fall and wrote about it, and within decades it had become a national symbol and one of the country's first real tourist attractions. A bridle path was laid out in 1872 for English travellers, and visitors also climbed a stairway of around 1,500 steps up the side of the valley. In 1891 the Fossli Hotel opened on the edge of the canyon, looking straight across at the fall; its timber buildings, expanded later by the architect Frederik Konow Lund, are still in use. Cruise ships in the Hardangerfjord made Vøringsfossen a standard excursion from around 1900.

   Did you know? Hansteen's guess was far too generous: a measurement made with a string in 1893 put the main drop at 163 metres.

   More about Vøringsfossen →

8. 08 Krimml Waterfalls

   Krimmler Wasserfälle

   Austria47.198° N 12.171° E

   

   The volume of water changes dramatically with the seasons, because part of the catchment is still covered by glaciers. In February only a trickle comes down, around 0.14 cubic metres per second, but in June and July, with snowmelt and ice melt at their height, the flow reaches about 5.6 cubic metres per second and the whole valley fills with spray. That permanent mist creates its own small world of mosses, lichens and ferns, and dozens of bird species nest in the damp woods beside the falls; since 2015 the site has also been recognised in Austria as a natural healing resource, on the basis of research into the effect of the spray on people with asthma.

   Did you know? During the flood of 25 August 1987 the flow reached 166.7 cubic metres per second, about thirty times the summer average, and caused enormous destruction.

   More about Krimml Waterfalls →

9. 09 Hraunfossar

   Iceland64.703° N 20.980° W

   

   What makes the place so beautiful is the contrast of textures and colours. The springs are cold — around 3.5 °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. From the bank above, the eye can follow the line of springs downstream, one after another, as if the bank itself were leaking light.

   Did you know? Locals also call the falls Girðingar, and the stretch of lava they emerge from is known as Gráhraun, the 'grey lava'.

   More about Hraunfossar →

10. 10 Gullfoss

    Iceland64.326° N 20.121° W

    

    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. That mismatch between the river's present flow and the scale of the canyon it sits in is part of what makes the two-tiered drop feel larger than the numbers suggest.

    Did you know? Below the falls the Hvítá runs through a gorge about 2.5 kilometres long and only some 20 metres wide.

    More about Gullfoss →

11. 11 Kravica Waterfall

    Kravica

    Bosnia and Herzegovina · 27.6 km from Mostar43.156° N 17.608° E

    

    The barrier itself is a living formation. Tufa is a porous limestone that builds up where water rich in dissolved calcium carbonate splashes over moss and plants, so the edge of the falls is slowly being made by the river itself rather than cut by it. A small grotto near the falls holds stalactites of the same mineral. In spring, when the river is high, the surrounding countryside turns a vivid green and the volume of water is at its greatest.

    Did you know? Many water mills and fulling stamps, used to beat and thicken woollen cloth, once worked along the falls.

    More about Kravica Waterfall →

12. 12 Dynjandi

    Iceland · 39.1 km from Ísafjörður65.733° N 23.199° W

    

    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. From the top the view opens out over the grey-blue water of Arnarfjörður and the steep, layered basalt mountains that define this corner of Iceland.

    Did you know? The rock wall the river pours down is a layer cake of lava flows and sediments, the oldest lavas about 13 to 14 million years old.

    More about Dynjandi →

13. 13 Cascata delle Marmore

    Italy42.551° N 12.715° E

    

    The story continued for nearly two thousand years. After the fall of Rome the channel silted up and the marshes returned. Pope Gregory XII had a new cut dug in 1422; Paul III commissioned Antonio da Sangallo the Younger to open another in 1545; and in 1598 Clement VIII inaugurated a widened channel with a regulating sluice designed by Giovanni Fontana. The present shape of the falls dates from 1787, when the architect Andrea Vici reshaped the lower leaps for Pius VI and finally tamed the floods. Byron gave the falls several stanzas of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

    Did you know? The Galleto power station, which takes most of the river's water, opened in 1929 and has a capacity of roughly 530 megawatts.

    More about Cascata delle Marmore →

14. 14 Dettifoss

    Iceland65.822° N 16.388° W

    

    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. Walking between them shows how the river is still eating its way back into the plateau.

    Did you know? Its fame for power comes from flow multiplied by drop; by sheer volume Iceland's Urriðafoss carries more water.

    More about Dettifoss →

15. 15 Svartifoss

    Iceland64.028° N 16.975° W

    

    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? The curtain of water is about 30 metres wide where it spills over the lip of the basalt amphitheatre.

    More about Svartifoss →

16. 16 Staubbach Falls

    Staubbachfall

    Switzerland46.590° N 7.906° E

    

    That fame is 18th-century, not modern. Goethe visited in 1779, was struck by the sight of water disintegrating down a sheer 300-metre wall, and wrote a poem about it — "Gesang der Geister über den Wassern" ("Song of the Spirits over the Waters") — directly inspired by what he saw. Byron came through in 1816 and, characteristically, went bigger: he described the falls as looking like the tail of the pale horse from the Book of Revelation, streaming out in the wind.

    Did you know? That rainbow found its way into Byron's Manfred, where the Witch of the Alps rises beneath the sunbow of a mountain torrent.

    More about Staubbach Falls →

17. 17 Trümmelbach Falls

    Trümmelbachfälle

    Switzerland46.569° N 7.915° E

    

    The water is meltwater from the glaciers on the flanks of the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau. The catchment covers about 24 km², roughly half of it under snow and ice, and at the peak of the melt in late spring and early summer the stream carries up to 20,000 litres per second, together with large quantities of rock debris ground off by the glaciers. The water is at its most turbid in spring; later in the year, as the flow drops, it often runs clearer.

    Did you know? The cleft cut by the stream is extremely narrow and barely widens towards the top, so the falls are hidden from the valley floor.

    More about Trümmelbach Falls →

18. 18 Hengifoss

    Iceland · 30.1 km from Egilsstaðir65.095° N 14.889° W

    

    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. Above Hengifoss the river makes two more, smaller, unnamed drops before reaching the edge of the plateau.

    Did you know? The red stripes owe their colour to iron in the old clay layers, which oxidised between the basalt flows much like rust.

    More about Hengifoss →

19. 19 Fervenza do Ézaro

    Cascada del Ézaro

    Spain42.913° N 9.117° W

    

    People have been struck by it for centuries. Texts from 1724 already describe the waterfall, comparing its spray to a great column of smoke that could be seen from several kilometres out at sea. Its old popular name, O Cadoiro, has been in use at least since the time of the 18th-century scholar Martín Sarmiento. Monte Pindo, which rises to about 630 metres behind the falls, is a mass of granite eroded into strange shapes, among them a famously balanced boulder, the Pedra do Brazal.

    Did you know? In the 10th century Bishop Sisnando of Iria Flavia had the castle of San Xurxo built on Monte Pindo against pirates; it was destroyed in 1467 during the Irmandiño revolts.

    More about Fervenza do Ézaro →

20. 20 Skradinski Buk, Krka National Park

    Skradinski buk

    Croatia · 9.9 km from Šibenik43.806° N 15.963° E

    

    That stone is still growing. Mosses and algae in the fast water help the river's dissolved lime settle out as porous tufa, so the barriers themselves are living structures, built up over millennia and constantly reshaped by the current. The flow changes sharply with the seasons, from a thin summer lace to heavy winter water, so the falls look and sound different at every visit. A circular trail of about 1.9 km crosses the channels and loops around the falls, bringing visitors close to the water; a viewpoint above takes in the whole staircase at once.

    Did you know? The natural tufa barrier backs the river up into a long lake that reaches upstream as far as Roški slap and about 3 km into the lower Čikola.

    More about Skradinski Buk, Krka National Park →

21. 21 Pliva Waterfall

    Pliva

    Bosnia and Herzegovina44.338° N 17.271° E

    

    The falls were once higher, around 30 metres. During the Bosnian War the Jajce-1 hydroelectric plant upstream was caught in the fighting and put out of service; a sudden surge of water damaged the travertine body of the waterfall, and the flooding that followed, together with an earthquake, left it at its present height. That power plant has its own place in history: built on the Pliva in 1899 under Austro-Hungarian rule, it was the first hydroelectric station in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the Balkans, and the Hungarian painter Csontváry Kosztka Tivadar painted it in 1903.

    Did you know? The first hydroelectric plant in Southeast Europe, Jajce-1, began generating on 24 March 1899 with a capacity of about 8 megawatts.

    More about Pliva Waterfall →

22. 22 Fairy Pools

    United Kingdom57.250° N 6.256° W

    

    The colour comes from the clarity of cold water fed straight off the mountains and running over bare rock, and it makes the pools look tropical in a landscape that is anything but: rocky ground, patches of bog and the steep gabbro peaks of the Black Cuillin, the highest mountains on Skye, closing the view. Wild swimmers come to dip in the pools despite the chill. Red deer graze in the glen, and the birdlife ranges from ravens, crows and gulls to meadow pipits; along the shore of Loch Brittle at the foot of the glen there are herons, curlews, dunlins and ringed plovers.

    Did you know? Donald Gorm Mòr MacDonald ended his trial marriage to Margaret MacLeod, who had lost an eye, by sending her home on a one-eyed horse with a one-eyed servant and dog.

    More about Fairy Pools →

23. 23 Krushuna Falls

    Крушунски водопад

    Bulgaria · 28.1 km from Lovech43.243° N 25.033° E

    

    The largest fall, known as Praskaloto, drops about 15 metres near the head of the cascade, close to the cave from which the river rises. Below it the water spreads into a series of lower falls and pools in the woodland, and the travertine continues to form wherever the water flows. The whole plateau is karst country, riddled with caves: Maarata, the cave where the river emerges, lies at the top of the cascade, and the well-known Devetashka Cave lies about 15 km to the west. A footpath built in the 2000s follows the river upstream from the village to the top of the falls, crossing it on a series of small bridges.

    Did you know? The Proynovska River is rich in dissolved limestone, which gives its pools a turquoise colour and keeps building new travertine.

    More about Krushuna Falls →

24. 24 Aldeyjarfoss

    Iceland65.366° N 17.337° W

    

    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. The effect is often compared to Svartifoss in the south of the country, which is far smaller.

    Did you know? The Bárðardalur lava was long attributed to the shield volcano Trölladyngja, but is now thought to come from a crater row in the Bárðarbunga volcanic system.

    More about Aldeyjarfoss →

25. 25 Háifoss

    Iceland64.208° N 19.686° W

    

    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 Fossá splits into two arms about 750 metres upstream; one forms Háifoss, the other Granni, and the streams reunite at the bottom of the gorge.

    More about Háifoss →