Fjaðrárgljúfur
Interesting facts
- Its name means 'feather river canyon', after the Fjaðrá, the Feather River, whose meltwater carved it.
- Justin Bieber filmed the video for his 2015 song 'I'll Show You' in the canyon; by 2019 it had passed 440 million views on YouTube.
- The Environment Agency of Iceland estimated that more than a million people visited the canyon in the few years after the video appeared.
- Annual visitor numbers almost doubled in a single year, from about 150,000 in 2017 to about 282,000 in 2018.
- In 2024 the eastern part of the canyon was formally designated a protected area under Icelandic law.
- The canyon lies within Katla UNESCO Global Geopark, named after the volcano hidden beneath the Mýrdalsjökull ice cap.
Why it is worth it
Fjaðrárgljúfur is a narrow, serpentine canyon in south-east Iceland, about two kilometres long and up to a hundred metres deep, cut into the green flank of the hills just west of Kirkjubæjarklaustur. Seen from its rim, the gorge twists back and forth like a ribbon: steep walls furred with moss drop to the thin, braided line of the Fjaðrá river, and the spurs of rock between the bends overlap so that each viewpoint reveals a new set of folds.
The rock is palagonite, a tuff formed when volcanoes erupted under glacial ice during the cold phases of the Ice Age, and is thought to be about two million years old. The canyon itself is far younger. At the end of the last glaciation, roughly nine thousand years ago, a lake dammed behind a band of harder rock drained through it, and the rushing meltwater tore a deep channel into the soft palagonite. Terraces along both sides of the valley still mark the lake's former level. The Fjaðrá, which rises on Geirlandshraun, now trickles along the bottom of that great cut before joining the Skaftá.
A path of about a mile climbs along the eastern edge, passing a series of lookouts, and ends at a viewing platform facing a slender waterfall that pours down the western wall at the head of the canyon. After the gorge appeared in a pop music video, the sudden surge of visitors threatened its fragile vegetation, and in 2019 the authorities closed it for a time to let the ground recover — a reminder that the moss here grows slowly and should be admired from the path.
Getting there
The canyon is about 10 km west of the village of Kirkjubæjarklaustur and about 250 km east of Reykjavík, roughly a three-hour drive along the Ring Road (Route 1). A signed turn-off just west of Kirkjubæjarklaustur leads a few kilometres up gravel Road 206 to the car park, which small cars can reach all year. The nearest airport by distance, Akureyri (AEY), is on the other side of the island's interior and impractical; most travellers arrive through Keflavík International Airport (KEF), about 50 km beyond Reykjavík.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Fjaðrárgljúfur is a canyon in south east Iceland. The Fjaðrá river flows through it.
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