Skógafoss

Where it sits. Skógafoss drops 60 metres over a cliff on the Skógá river at the hamlet of Skógar, on Iceland's south coast about 150 kilometres from Reykjavik and 30 kilometres west of Vík. The waterfall is around 25 metres wide and falls in a single unbroken curtain onto a flat gravel bed, which is why visitors can walk right to the base on level ground — an unusually generous arrangement for a fall of this size. The cliff it pours over is not random: it is the old sea cliff line, the coast as it stood at the end of the last glaciation, now stranded about five kilometres inland by land uplift and by the sediment the glacial rivers have dumped along the shore. The same escarpment runs east and west for tens of kilometres, and Seljalandsfoss falls over it 30 kilometres to the west.

The story behind it. Local legend gives the falls a settler, Þrasi Þórólfsson, who is said to have farmed at Skógar in the ninth century and hidden a chest of gold in a cave behind the water. Later generations reportedly found the chest and got a grip on the ring on its side before it slipped away again, leaving them with the ring alone. The ring is said to have ended up on the door of the local church, and it is now among the holdings of the Skógar Museum beside the falls, a substantial folk collection founded in 1949 by Þórður Tómasson that includes turf houses, a timber church and a fishing boat, and is one of the better regional museums in the country. The story is folklore, not history, but the museum and the church door are entirely real.

On screen. Skógar and the south-coast escarpment have hosted a long queue of productions, and the waterfall's fame owes as much to advertising and music video as to film. Icelandic units returned here in 2018 during the eighth season of Game of Thrones, and the gorge-and-waterfall setting where Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen land the dragons was assembled from Icelandic plates; reporting has named more than one south-coast fall, and the finished shot is a composite rather than a single real place, so travellers should arrive expecting the waterfall rather than the scene. The falls have also carried Bollywood — the song sequences of Dilwale filmed on this coast in 2015 — and a run of international music videos drawn by the fact that the drop is enormous, roadside and photogenic in almost any light.

What you actually see today. The mist thrown up by 60 metres of falling water hangs permanently over the plunge pool, and on sunny days it produces a rainbow, occasionally a double, generally strongest in the middle of the day. Getting close means getting wet. A metal staircase of several hundred steps climbs the eastern side to a viewing platform level with the lip, a fifteen-minute effort that gives a view down the Skógá to the sea and across to the Vestmannaeyjar islands on a clear day. From that platform the Fimmvörðuháls trail continues north, following the river past a chain of more than twenty further waterfalls before crossing the 1,000-metre pass between the Eyjafjallajökull and Mýrdalsjökull ice caps and descending to Þórsmörk, a 25-kilometre day for fit walkers.

What the river does upstream. The Skógá rises in meltwater from Eyjafjallajökull and Mýrdalsjökull and loses the height of the escarpment in stages, so the fall at Skógar is only the last and largest of a long sequence. Walkers who continue past the platform meet more than twenty further waterfalls in the first eight kilometres, most of them unnamed and nearly all of them unvisited, in a canyon that narrows and deepens as it climbs. The 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull loaded this catchment with ash and the river ran black for weeks; most of that sediment has flushed through, but ash still shows in the banks.

Getting there and timing. Skógafoss sits directly beside Route 1 with its own access road, car park, campsite, hotel, cafe and toilets, so it is one of the easiest major sights in Iceland to reach; scheduled buses stop at the turn-off. The car park is busy from mid-morning to late afternoon in summer, and the base of the falls can hold a hundred people at once. Early morning and evening are markedly quieter, and the midnight light in June is extraordinary here. In winter the staircase ices and is sometimes closed, the spray freezes onto the flanking cliffs in sheets, and the approach path can be a skating rink; spikes are worth carrying. Fulmars nest on the cliff walls beside the fall and are noisy company from spring into summer.