Krafla

Where it sits. Krafla is a volcanic caldera about 10 kilometres across in the Mývatn district of north-east Iceland, with a fissure swarm some 90 kilometres long running through it. It sits directly on the divergent plate boundary where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart, above the Iceland hotspot — which is the short explanation for why the ground here is hot, cracked and rearranging itself. The highest point of the massif reaches 818 metres. Twenty-nine eruptions have been recorded here since Iceland was settled.

Two eruption cycles worth knowing. The Mývatn Fires of 1724 to 1729 opened fissure vents across the area and sent lava towards Reykjahlíð, destroying farms — the flow famously stopped at the edge of the churchyard, a detail local tradition has never let go of. That episode also blew out Víti, the explosion crater whose name means hell and which now holds a startling green-blue lake in a bowl of red-brown scoria. Then came the Krafla Fires of 1975 to 1984: nine eruptions and fifteen episodes of ground inflation and subsidence over nine years, which allowed geophysicists to map a magma chamber beneath the caldera by tracking earthquakes. Some of the lava fountaining was filmed at close range by Maurice and Katia Krafft, footage that resurfaced in the 2022 documentary Fire of Love.

On screen. The snow-covered lava country around Krafla and Lake Mývatn provided the exterior landscapes of Starkiller Base in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, shot in the winter of 2014. Craters, fissures, black lava under fresh snow and the rock formations at nearby Dimmuborgir gave the production a planet-scale surface that needed comparatively little digital work — the forest and the ice canyon of the final duel were built and generated elsewhere, but the wide, cold, broken terrain the First Order's weapon was carved into is this district. Iceland has since become such a fixture in the franchise that it is easy to conflate the locations; here the honest summary is that the Mývatn–Krafla region supplied the establishing landscape rather than any character scene.

What you actually see today. A road climbs from the Ring Road near Reykjahlíð past the Krafla geothermal power station to a car park beneath Víti; a marked path circles the crater rim in about 40 minutes, with steep drops and no railing. North-west of it lies Leirhnjúkur, the vent of the 1975–84 eruptions, reached by a boardwalk and gravel trail of roughly two and a half kilometres return across lava that is still warm and still steaming, with sulphur-stained mud, coloured clay and fresh-looking rope lava. The crust here is thin in places and the ground genuinely hot: staying on the marked path is not a suggestion.

The power station and the magma well. Krafla has produced geothermal electricity since 1977 and now runs at around 60 megawatts, which makes the pipework, wellheads and steam plumes part of the landscape rather than an intrusion. In 2009 a borehole of the Iceland Deep Drilling Project, IDDP-1, unexpectedly hit molten rhyolite magma at just 2.1 kilometres depth — one of only a handful of times anyone has drilled into magma anywhere. That accident became a research programme: the Krafla Magma Testbed aims to drill into the body deliberately and instrument it, effectively building the world's first magma observatory. The power station has a visitor exhibition explaining the geology and the plant.

Standing on the plate boundary. What makes Krafla unusual among volcanic sites is how visible the rifting is. During the 1975–84 episode the ground here pulled apart by several metres in total, and the fissures are open at the surface: long, straight, dark-walled cracks running north-east to south-west across the lava, some narrow enough to step over and some wide enough to swallow a bus. Walking the Leirhnjúkur trail means crossing the join between two continents repeatedly in half an hour, which is a fair claim to make about very few paths anywhere.

Nearby. Námafjall and the Hverir field, a few kilometres south, boil with mud pools and fumaroles in ochre and grey. Lake Mývatn adds pseudocraters at Skútustaðir, the lava labyrinth of Dimmuborgir, the tephra cone of Hverfjall, and the Mývatn Nature Baths for soaking afterwards. Dettifoss, Europe's most powerful waterfall by volume, is about an hour east.

Getting there and timing. Krafla is roughly 100 kilometres east of Akureyri and about six hours from Reykjavík by road; Route 863 to Víti is a mountain spur that normally opens in June and closes with the first serious snow, so a winter visit means viewing from the main road. June to September is the working season, with July and August the busiest. There is no fee. Bring wind protection: the caldera is high, exposed and cold even in July, and the steam that makes it photogenic will soak you in the wrong breeze.