The Most Spectacular Sea Stacks in Europe
12 places in 7 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular sea stacks in Europe are Hvítserkur (Iceland), Risin og Kellingin (Faroe Islands) and The Needles (United Kingdom). The list covers 12 sea stacks in 7 countries. The United Kingdom has the most, with 3. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A sea stack is a coastline caught halfway through its own destruction. Waves exploit cracks in a headland, hollow out caves, punch them through into arches, and finally bring down the arch roof, leaving a lone pillar standing in the sea. Europe's Atlantic and North Sea coasts are ideal for this: hard basalt in Iceland and the Faroes, red sandstone in Orkney, white chalk along the English Channel, all battered by some of the roughest water in the world. Almost every stack has collected a legend along the way.
Iceland's Hvítserkur, a basalt rock on the Vatnsnes peninsula, looks like a beast bending to drink, and the black columns of Reynisdrangar rise off the beach at Vík, said to be trolls caught by the dawn. In the Faroes, Risin og Kellingin, the Giant and the Witch, stand off the northern tip of Eysturoy, and Drangarnir off Vágar pairs a stack with a pointed arch. Orkney's Old Man of Hoy is a tall sandstone tower facing the open Atlantic.
Chalk gives softer, brighter shapes. The Needles run in a line from the western tip of the Isle of Wight to a lighthouse, Old Harry Rocks stand off the Dorset coast, and the Aiguille d'Étretat rises beside the great arch of the Porte d'Aval, painted by Monet, who also painted the jagged Aiguilles de Port-Coton on Belle-Île. Ireland's Dún Briste was split from Downpatrick Head by the sea, Sweden's Langhammars on Fårö is a field of limestone pillars, and Cyprus's Petra tou Romiou marks the shore where Aphrodite is said to have risen from the waves.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hvítserkur | Stack | Iceland | |
| 2 | Risin og Kellingin | Stack | Faroe Islands | |
| 3 | The Needles | Stack | United Kingdom | |
| 4 | Reynisdrangar | Stack | Iceland | |
| 5 | Old Man of Hoy | Stack | United Kingdom | |
| 6 | Old Harry Rocks | Stack | United Kingdom | |
| 7 | Petra tou Romiou | Stack | Cyprus | |
| 8 | Drangarnir | Stack | Faroe Islands | |
| 9 | Dún Briste | Stack | Ireland | |
| 10 | Langhammars | Stack | Sweden | |
| 11 | Aiguilles de Port-Coton, Belle-Île | Stack | France | |
| 12 | Aiguille d'Étretat | Stack | France |
01 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? A magnitude-7 earthquake shook the Skagafjörður area of north Iceland in 1963, and the stack is thought to have survived it only thanks to the concrete poured around its base.
02 Risin og Kellingin
Faroe Islands · 35.8 km from Tórshavn62.323° N 7.104° W
Sanshiro KUBOTA from London, UK · CC BY 2.0 The legend that named them was collected in V. U. Hammershaimb's Færøsk Anthologi of 1891. The giants of Iceland, the story goes, envied the Faroes and sent a giant and his wife to drag the islands north. They came to Eiðiskollur, the north-westernmost mountain; the giant waited in the sea while the witch climbed up with a rope to bind the islands and heave them onto his back. At her first pull the outer part of the mountain split away, and all night they strained without moving the islands, which were fixed too firmly to their foundations. Absorbed in the work, they forgot the time, the sun rose out of the sea, and they turned to stone where they stood, still gazing towards Iceland.
Did you know? In Faroese tradition, the rock that split away at the witch's first pull is the outer summit of the mountain, known as Ytri Kollur.
03 The Needles
United Kingdom · 29.6 km from Southampton50.663° N 1.589° W
Image by JStephenArts from Pixabay Their shape owes much to the earth movements of the Alpine mountain-building period, which folded the chalk beds here until they stood almost on end. That near-vertical layering is why the stacks break away as thin, upright slabs rather than rounded lumps. There used to be a fourth: a slender pillar, said to have been around 120 feet tall and known as Lot's Wife, which fell during a storm in 1764. It was that lost spire, not the blunter survivors, that gave the group its name, from the Old English word for a needle.
Did you know? Rocket engines tested on the cliffs of High Down powered Black Arrow, which in 1971 launched the Prospero satellite into orbit.
04 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. The name Reynisdrangar is usually explained as "Reynir's pillars", after a settler whose name also passed to the mountain.
Did you know? According to legend, Landdrangur is the petrified male troll and Langhamar the ship, while Skessudrangur takes its name from a troll-woman.
05 Old Man of Hoy
United Kingdom · 29.2 km from Kirkwall58.886° N 3.432° W
Stephen Temple from Cape Town, South Africa · CC BY-SA 2.0 For all its presence, the Old Man is young. Old maps from 1600 and 1750 show only a headland at this point; by 1819 the stack had been cut off, and the painter William Daniell sketched it then as a broader column standing on two legs over an arch — the "man" of the name. Early in the 19th century a storm washed away one leg, leaving the single pillar seen today. A deep crack opened in its south face by the 1990s, and the stack will eventually fall into the sea; the ocean here is exposed to Atlantic gales and deep water close inshore.
Did you know? In 2019 Jesse Dufton, who is also blind, led the climb himself, an ascent recorded in the documentary Climbing Blind.
06 Old Harry Rocks
United Kingdom · 9.9 km from Bournemouth50.642° N 1.924° W
Image by diego_torres from Pixabay The chalk was laid down 84–72 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous and is striped with bands of flint. The formations are a lesson in coastal erosion made visible. The sea works into joints and cracks, opening caves; caves become arches; arches collapse and leave free-standing stacks, which in turn are worn down to stumps. Old Harry is the tallest stack; his "wife" is now a low stump — the original wife fell in 1509 — and further back are the headland known as No Man's Land, the gap of St Lucas' Leap and the Pinnacles. The National Trust, which owns the rocks, has chosen to let the sea do its work rather than fight it, so the scene will keep changing.
Did you know? The Jurassic Coast, which ends here, was inscribed by UNESCO in December 2001 as England's first wholly natural World Heritage Site.
07 Petra tou Romiou
Πέτρα του Ρωμιού
Cyprus · 21.4 km from Paphos34.664° N 32.627° E
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay The classical myth goes back to Hesiod's Theogony. Cronus, urged on by his mother Gaia, maimed his father Uranus and cast the severed parts into the sea, and from the foam that gathered around them Aphrodite was born. A Cypriot version of the tale holds that the rock itself is a piece of Uranus's body, and that the maiden who rose from the foam was carried first to Kythera and then on to Cyprus. The goddess had one of her most important cult centres a few kilometres away, at the sanctuary of Old Paphos in present-day Kouklia, which ties the legend to a real place of worship. Local tradition adds that anyone who swims around the rock will be granted lasting beauty.
Did you know? Detached limestone blocks along this coast range from about five to a hundred metres across, and many carry slide surfaces showing they broke away and moved.
08 Drangarnir
Faroe Islands · 31.5 km from Tórshavn62.075° N 7.414° W
Erik Christensen , Porkeri. · CC BY-SA 3.0 The stacks are built of the same basalt as the rest of the Faroes, the product of lava flows laid down layer upon layer and later carved by the sea into cliffs, arches and pillars. The surrounding waters and ledges fill with seabirds between May and September. Drangarnir is privately owned land, and the stacks themselves are reached only by boat; visitors usually see them from the water, on trips out of the harbour of Sørvágur, or from the shore at the small village of Bøur, from where they can be seen in the distance.
Did you know? The 2025 live-action How to Train Your Dragon was filmed at the stacks themselves, with Hiccup and Toothless flying beneath them.
09 Dún Briste
Dun Briste
Ireland54.328° N 9.348° W
Bargode · CC BY-SA 4.0 That bridge is traditionally said to have failed in a violent storm in 1393, when the people living on the promontory had to be brought across the new chasm on ropes. Local legend tells the story differently: Saint Patrick, having founded a church on the headland, was defied by the pagan chieftain Crom Dubh, and struck the ground with his staff so that the chieftain's fort was split away from the mainland. The ruins of an early church and a statue of the saint still stand on the headland. When researchers were landed on top of the stack by helicopter in 1980, they found the remains of stone buildings and of walls for sheep, confirming that the summit had once been lived on.
Did you know? The 1980 landing on 30 July put people on the stack for the first time in centuries; the team camped overnight on the summit.
10 Langhammars
Langhammars naturreservat
Sweden57.983° N 19.167° E
ArildV · CC BY-SA 4.0 Rauks are found on Gotland and a few other Swedish coasts, and Fårö is especially rich in them. Their stone is limestone laid down as reefs in a tropical sea during the Silurian period, more than 400 million years ago. After the last ice age the waves of the Baltic attacked the cliffs along existing cracks, hollowing out caves and arches until only isolated columns remained; photographs from 1900 and 1966 show that some rauks have since vanished, so the shapes are still changing. Carl Linnaeus, who travelled through Gotland in 1741, was the first scientist to describe them, calling them "stone giants".
Did you know? Besides Shame, Bergman shot Through a Glass Darkly, Persona, Hour of the Wolf, The Passion of Anna and Scenes from a Marriage on Fårö.
11 Aiguilles de Port-Coton, Belle-Île
Aiguilles de Port-Coton
France47.306° N 3.240° W
Rivière, Henri (1864-1951). Dessinateur · Public domain The rocks owe their fame to Claude Monet. He arrived in Le Palais, the island's main town, on 12 September 1886, intending to stay a fortnight, and left only on 25 November. In letters to Alice Hoschedé he called this coast sinister, diabolical and magnificent, and he painted the same group of needles six times from one viewpoint, under clear midday light, mist, broken cloud and the warm sun of late afternoon, with the sea shifting from calm to storm. The series, The Pyramids of Port-Coton, is now divided among the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, the museum in Caracas and other collections.
Did you know? Constant changes of cloud, wind and rain pushed Monet to paint the same motifs again and again, an early step towards his later series of haystacks and cathedrals.
12 Aiguille d'Étretat
France · 23.4 km from Le Havre49.707° N 0.193° E
Image by baccus7 from Pixabay The chalk, Turonian and Coniacian in age, shifts colour with the weather and the hour, from bone-white at noon to pink and gold at sunset. Painters came for exactly that: Eugène Boudin, Charles Daubigny, Gustave Courbet and, most persistently, Claude Monet, who painted the arch and the Needle several times in the 1880s. Guy de Maupassant wrote about the Manneporte, the largest of the three arches, some 500 metres further south-west, as a gateway a ship could sail through under full canvas.
Did you know? Leblanc had the letters D and F cut into the Chambre des Demoiselles in 1927; by 2021 the D had worn away.
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 spectacular sea stacks in Europe?
- On our list, Hvítserkur (Iceland) ranks first, followed by Risin og Kellingin (Faroe Islands) and The Needles (United Kingdom).
- Which country has the most sea stacks in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from the United Kingdom (3), the Faroe Islands (2) and France (2).
- How is a sea stack formed?
- Waves erode weak points in a headland into caves, which can break through to form an arch. When the top of the arch collapses, the seaward part is left standing alone as a stack, which is itself slowly worn down to a stump.
- How tall is the Old Man of Hoy?
- The Old Man of Hoy in Orkney is about 137 metres tall, one of the tallest sea stacks in Britain. It was first climbed in 1966 by Chris Bonington, Rusty Baillie and Tom Patey.
- What is the legend of Risin og Kellingin?
- In Faroese legend, a giant and a witch were sent from Iceland to drag the Faroe Islands north. They worked through the night, failed to finish before sunrise, and were turned to stone by the first light of day.
- How many sea stacks are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 12 sea stacks in 7 countries. The United Kingdom has the most, with 3.