The Most Spectacular Geysers in the World
7 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular geysers in the world are Strokkur (Iceland), Old Faithful (United States) and Fly Geyser (United States). The list covers 7 geysers in 6 countries. The United States has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A geyser is a hot spring that periodically throws water and steam into the air, and it is one of the rarest features on the planet. It needs three things at once: heat from magma close to the surface, a steady supply of groundwater and a narrow, constricted channel that lets pressure build until the water flashes to steam. The spectacle lies in that rhythm: the pool trembling, a dome of turquoise water swelling, then a column bursting upward and falling back as drifting steam, often among mineral terraces and pools coloured by heat-loving microbes.
Strokkur in Iceland's Haukadalur erupts every few minutes beside Geysir, the spring that gave all geysers their name. Old Faithful in Yellowstone is known the world over for its regularity. Fly Geyser in Nevada is an accident of drilling: water escaping from a well sunk in the 1960s has built a mound of multicoloured mineral cones. El Tatio, high in the Chilean Andes, sends up dozens of steam columns in the cold of early morning, and Pōhutu at Whakarewarewa in Rotorua is the largest active geyser in the Southern Hemisphere. Andernach on the Rhine is something else again, a cold-water geyser driven by carbon dioxide rather than heat.
The geysers in this collection were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a place on the map, and the section can also be browsed by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Strokkur | Geyser | Iceland | |
| 2 | Old Faithful | Geyser | United States | |
| 3 | Fly Geyser | Geyser | United States | |
| 4 | Valley of Geysers | Geyser | Russia | |
| 5 | El Tatio | Geyser | Chile | |
| 6 | Andernach Geyser | Geyser | Germany | |
| 7 | Pōhutu Geyser | Geyser | New Zealand |
01 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. Few natural geysers anywhere erupt so often and so reliably, and so the moment can be watched again and again: the pool drawing down, the glassy bubble rising, the explosion, the drifting cloud.
Did you know? At 23 metres down in its conduit the water reaches about 130 °C, far above the surface boiling point but kept liquid by pressure.
02 Old Faithful
United States44.460° N 110.828° W
Image by TXVisual from Pixabay Old Faithful is not the tallest geyser in Yellowstone, nor the most powerful — that distinction belongs to the erratic Steamboat Geyser. What makes it extraordinary is its punctuality. The cone sits in the Upper Geyser Basin beside the Firehole River, and roughly every hour and a half it clears its throat with a few splashes before hurling a column of boiling water skyward, on average about 145 feet (44 m), for anything between a minute and a half and five minutes. It was the first geyser in the park to receive a name, given by members of the Washburn–Langford–Doane Expedition who walked into the basin on 18 September 1870 and saw it erupt before anything else.
Did you know? Radiocarbon-dated wood in its silica mound shows trees once grew on Old Faithful, meaning the geyser fell silent for decades during severe 13th–14th-century droughts.
03 Fly Geyser
United States40.859° N 119.332° W
Jeremy C. Munns · Public domain Fly Geyser exists because two different attempts to find something else both failed in useful ways. In 1916, a well drilled in the Black Rock Desert in search of irrigation water struck a pocket of geothermal heat instead, and a modest geyser began venting on the spot. Decades later, in 1964, a geothermal energy company drilled a second test well nearby hoping to find water hot enough to generate power; the water that came up wasn't quite hot enough for that purpose, but at over 200°F it was more than hot enough to keep flowing once the well was left improperly capped. Nothing about the geyser was designed — it's the unintended byproduct of two commercial failures, decades apart, on the same patch of desert.
Did you know? Quartz is forming inside Fly Geyser remarkably fast thanks to its very silica-rich water, a process that usually takes up to 10,000 years in geysers.
04 Valley of Geysers
Russia54.431° N 160.139° E
Robert Nunn from London, UK · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Valley of Geysers in Kamchatka is a six-kilometre gorge on the Geysernaya River where some ninety geysers and many hot springs break out of the slopes, making it the second-largest geyser field in the world. The water is heated by the young stratovolcano Kikhpinych; hundreds of metres below the caldera floor it reaches temperatures of 250 °C. Most of the vents lie on the left bank of the river, and the whole basin steams.
Did you know? When the valley was found in 1941, geysers were known only in Iceland, the United States and New Zealand; none had ever been recorded in Asia.
05 El Tatio
Chile22.331° S 68.010° W
Image by michellebranco11 from Pixabay El Tatio is a field of geysers and boiling springs on a high Andean plain in northern Chile, 4,320 metres above sea level, beneath a line of volcanoes that marks the border with Bolivia. It is the largest geyser field in the Southern Hemisphere and the third largest in the world, holding by some counts around 8 per cent of all the planet's geysers. The name comes from Kunza, the nearly vanished language of the Atacama, and has been translated as "oven" and also as "grandfather", the geysers being, in one telling, his tears.
Did you know? Together with Sol de Mañana just across the border in Bolivia, El Tatio is the highest-altitude geyser field in the world.
06 Andernach Geyser
Geysir Andernach
Germany · 19.3 km from Koblenz50.448° N 7.375° E
Jürgen Hamann · CC BY-SA 4.0 On a wooded peninsula in the Rhine, a column of water shoots up to 50 or 60 metres with no heat behind it at all. The Andernach Geyser, on the Namedyer Werth nature reserve near the town of Andernach in Rhineland-Palatinate, is the highest cold-water geyser in the world, a record entered by Guinness World Records in 2008. Its power comes from carbon dioxide, which works much like the gas in a shaken bottle of mineral water.
Did you know? Water at the bottom of the borehole is under a pressure of about 35 bar, which is what drives the gas-charged column upward.
07 Pōhutu Geyser
New Zealand · 3.6 km from Rotorua38.164° S 176.254° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay Pōhutu is the largest active geyser in the Southern Hemisphere and the centrepiece of Te Whakarewarewa, the geothermal valley on the southern edge of Rotorua. It can throw a column of boiling water and steam up to about 30 metres into the air, and it erupts as often as twenty times a day, each display lasting ten to twenty minutes. Its name comes from te reo Māori and is usually rendered as "big splash", "explosion" or "constant splashing" — all of which fit.
Did you know? In the early 2000s Pōhutu went through long spells of almost non-stop activity, including one reported to have lasted about 250 days.
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 is the most spectacular geyser in the world?
- On our list, Strokkur (Iceland) ranks first, followed by Old Faithful (United States) and Fly Geyser (United States).
- Where does the word geyser come from?
- It comes from Geysir, a hot spring in the Haukadalur valley in Iceland, whose name derives from the Old Norse verb geysa, to gush.
- Which country has the most geysers?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (2), Chile (1) and Germany (1).
- How often does Old Faithful erupt?
- Old Faithful erupts at intervals that usually range from about one to two hours. Its regularity is what led the Washburn expedition to give it its name in 1870.
- How many geysers are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 7 geysers in 6 countries. The United States has the most, with 2.