Skaftafell

Where it sits. Skaftafell occupies a wedge of green hillside in the district of Öræfi in south-east Iceland, pinned between the Vatnajökull ice cap above and the grey desert of Skeiðarársandur below. Route 1 runs past its entrance, 330 kilometres from Reykjavík and about an hour and a half west of Höfn. The setting is the reason it exists as a destination: glacier tongues push down on either side — Skaftafellsjökull to the east, Svínafellsjökull beyond it, Morsárjökull at the head of the western valley — while the slopes between them carry birch scrub, angelica, ferns and one of the most reliable pockets of sunshine on Iceland's rainy south coast. Directly above stands Öræfajökull, whose rim carries Hvannadalshnjúkur, at 2,110 metres the highest point in the country.

The story behind it. Skaftafell was a farm before it was a park. Meetings were held on its land soon after settlement, but the Öræfajökull eruption of 1362 wiped out the entire district, which has been called Öræfi — the wasteland — ever since. Farms were re-established, then squeezed by a cooling climate, repeated glacial floods off Grímsvötn and rivers that buried the hayfields in ash and sand. The Skeiðará shifted so close that in the early nineteenth century the farm was moved up onto the slopes and split into three households; one of them, Sel, was abandoned in 1946 and has been restored as a turf-roofed museum piece that visitors can walk into. Farming ended here in 1988. The area became Skaftafell National Park on 15 September 1967 and was absorbed into the much larger Vatnajökull National Park on 7 June 2008; the whole was inscribed by UNESCO in 2019.

Svínafellsjökull and the screen. The outlet glacier a few kilometres east of the visitor centre has had an unlikely second career as a stand-in for other worlds. Christopher Nolan filmed the frozen surface of Mann's planet in Interstellar on it, having already used this ice and the cap above it for the Himalayan sequences of Batman Begins, and Game of Thrones shot beyond-the-Wall material in the same area. The reason is the texture of the ice: Svínafellsjökull's tongue is a chaos of pressure ridges and ash-striped seracs that reads as alien on camera without any set dressing. Access has been another matter since 2018, when researchers identified a large fracture in the Svínafellsheiði mountainside above the glacier and warned of a possible major landslide; tour operators and the park have restricted or rerouted access, and the sensible course is to check current guidance rather than walk in.

What you actually see today. The visitor centre sits at the road end with a campsite, café and park information. The most-walked route is the short climb to Svartifoss, roughly 1.5 kilometres and 130 metres of ascent, where a 20-metre fall drops over a curtain of hexagonal basalt columns; the shapes influenced Icelandic architects, and their echo is usually pointed out in the tower of Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík and the ceiling of the National Theatre. Continuing up gets you to Sjónarnípa, a rim viewpoint that looks straight down onto Skaftafellsjökull's crevassed tongue. A flatter path leads east to the glacier lagoon at Skaftafellsjökull itself, where markers record how far the ice has retreated. Longer days run west into Morsárdalur to the birch wood of Bæjarstaðarskógur, or up to Kristínartindar at 1,126 metres. Morsárfoss, uncovered by the retreating ice around 2007 and at roughly 228 metres the tallest waterfall in Iceland, is visible from high ground in the park.

The sandur. West of Skaftafell, Route 1 crosses Skeiðarársandur, an outwash plain some 30 kilometres wide, built entirely from material carried out by glacial floods. The ring road was only completed in 1974, when the Skeiðará was finally bridged; in November 1996 a jökulhlaup from the Gjálp eruption destroyed part of that work in a few hours, and a monument of twisted girders stands beside the road as a reminder. In 2009 the Skeiðará changed course entirely, so the long bridge now spans very little water — a landscape that rewrites itself within a human lifetime.

Getting there and timing. There is no accommodation inside the park beyond the campsite; the nearest hotels are at Freysnes, five minutes east, with more at Kirkjubæjarklaustur 70 kilometres west and Höfn to the east. Buses on the south-coast route stop at the visitor centre in summer. Parking is charged. Summer gives long light, open trails and the mild micro-climate the district is known for; late winter gives the firmest glacier ice for guided walks and ice caves, but shorter days and the real possibility of road closures on the sandur in wind.