Gullfoss

Interesting facts

The falls drop in two stages, first about 11 metres and then about 21 metres, for a total of some 32 metres.

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

In summer about 140 cubic metres of water pass over the falls every second, falling to about 80 in winter; the record flood reached around 2,000.

The Hvítá, whose name means white river for its pale glacial silt, flows about 40 kilometres from the glacial lake Hvítárvatn at the foot of Langjökull before reaching the falls.

The Icelandic state acquired the waterfall around 1940, and in 1979 Gullfoss and the surrounding land were formally protected.

The memorial to Sigríður Tómasdóttir above the falls was unveiled in 1978, and a visitor centre named Sigríðarstofa followed in 1994.

Why it is worth it

Gullfoss looks like a natural monument, but it survived as one only because a farmer's daughter refused to let it be sold. In the early 1900s, an English investor negotiated a lease with the landowner, Tómas Tómasson, intending to dam the river and build a hydroelectric plant that would have drowned the falls entirely — a deal Tómasson apparently didn't fully grasp the implications of when he signed it. His daughter, Sigríður Tómasdóttir, who had grown up on the neighboring farm and had personally cut the first walking path to the waterfall, spent her own savings hiring a lawyer and made repeated trips on foot to Reykjavík — a journey of roughly 120 kilometres each way, on foot, over unpaved terrain — to challenge the lease in court. She reportedly threatened to throw herself into the falls if construction went ahead. Her legal case ultimately failed, but the foreign investors lost interest and stopped making payments; the lease lapsed and became void in 1928, and the waterfall survived by default rather than by court victory. She's remembered today as one of Iceland's first environmentalists, with a memorial stone standing on the cliffs above the falls she fought to save.

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.

Today Gullfoss anchors the Golden Circle, Iceland's most-visited tourist route, named directly after the waterfall itself — a slightly circular piece of naming, given that "gull" means gold and the falls gave their name to the golden light that plays across the spray on a clear day, and then lent that same name back to the road built to reach them.

Getting there

89 km from Reykjavík. Reykjavík Domestic Airport (RKV) is about 91 km away.

Gullfoss

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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