A country · 222 places · 9 regions
Iceland, all of it.
222 curated places across 9 regions — photographed, mapped, and noted with the season each is best in.
The 4 biggest regions — Southern Region, Northeastern Region, Eastern Region and Capital Region — read below as chapters, with 5 more waiting past them.
Chapter I · Southern Region · 75 places
Southern Region
Reynisfjara is the black sand beach on the south coast of Iceland immediately west of the village of Vík í Mýrdal, backed by the 340-metre bulk of Reynisfjall and closed at its eastern end by a wall of basalt columns. It sits on privately owned land inside the Katla UNESCO Global Geopark. Offshore stand the Reynisdrangar sea stacks; two kilometres west, past the headland, is the Dyrhólaey promontory with its famous sea arch. On a clear day Eyjafjallajökull is visible along the coast to the north-west. What it is made of. The sand is pulverised basalt, ground down and delivered to the coast by rivers and glacial floods, then sorted by surf into a mixture of fine black grit and rounded pebbles. The columns at the eastern end formed as a lava flow cooled slowly and cracked into hexagons, and where the sea has cut into them it has opened Hálsanefshellir, a cave whose roof and walls are made of the same columnar jointing. Icelandic tradition explains the stacks differently: they are trolls who were hauling a ship to shore and were caught by sunrise, which turns trolls to stone. Recent change. The beach is not a fixed thing. In February 2026, after weeks of easterly winds and heavy surf, part of the basalt column formation collapsed and a substantial amount of sand was stripped from the beach; with the return of westerly winds the sand was expected to be rebuilt over following months. Anyone arriving with a photograph in mind should be prepared for the place to look different from the picture. On screen. Reynisfjara supplied part of the Icelandic photography that built the planet Lah'mu in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, shot in September 2015 — the black shoreline and dark surf that establish Jyn Erso's home world, combined with material from the plain of Mýrdalssandur a few kilometres east where the farmstead set stood. The beach is one of the most heavily filmed locations in Iceland and turns up regularly in television, music video and advertising work, precisely because it offers a fully alien coastline within two and a half hours of Reykjavík. The danger, stated plainly. Reynisfjara kills people. The beach faces the open Atlantic with no shelving offshore shelf to slow the swell, and it produces sneaker waves — surges that run far higher up the sand than the preceding dozen waves, with no warning, and then drag back hard into water cold enough to disable a swimmer in minutes. There have been multiple fatalities, including visitors who were standing on dry sand or posing with their backs to the sea. A warning system with signs and lights indicating the day's danger level is installed at the access point. The rules are simple: watch the water constantly, never turn your back on it, stay well above the highest wet line on the sand, and do not enter Hálsanefshellir when the surf is running. A safer alternative next door. Vík has its own black beach, Víkurfjara, on the eastern side of Reynisfjall, reached from the village in a few minutes on foot. It looks out at the same Reynisdrangar stacks from the other side, has the same black sand, and — while the Atlantic there deserves the same respect — it is a far less concentrated hazard than the column end of Reynisfjara, where people cluster on the rocks for photographs. Above the village stands Vík's small red-roofed church on a hill, which doubles as the designated assembly point should Katla erupt and send a flood down the valley. Wildlife. Puffins nest on the grassy tops of Reynisfjall and along the cliffs from roughly May to early August, along with fulmars and guillemots; the cliff paths above the beach give reasonable views without disturbing the burrows. Dyrhólaey, next door, has restricted access during the nesting season to protect birds, so check before planning a visit there. Getting there and timing. Reynisfjara is about 180 kilometres from Reykjavík — two and a half hours on Route 1 — with a signed turn onto Route 215 shortly before Vík. There is a paved car park, subject to a charge, with toilets and a restaurant at the beach. Summer daytime is very busy with coach traffic; early morning and evening are far quieter and the light is better, since the cliffs face roughly south-west and the columns catch the late sun. Winter brings dramatic surf, occasional ice on the black sand and long low light, but also storms severe enough to make the beach genuinely unsafe. The car park and the restaurant are level, but the beach itself is soft sand and loose pebbles that no wheeled mobility aid will manage. Vík, five minutes east, has fuel, shops and hotels.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter II · Northeastern Region · 28 places
Northeastern Region
Mývatn is a shallow lake of about 37 square kilometres in northeast Iceland, sitting at 277 metres above sea level roughly 90 kilometres east of Akureyri on Route 1 and 100 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. It is broad and thin: the mean depth is around 2.5 metres and the deepest point barely exceeds four, which is why the whole basin warms quickly in summer and freezes solid in winter. More than fifty islands and skerries break the surface. The lake drains west through the Laxá river toward Skjálfandi bay, and the district around it, centred on the village of Reykjahlíð with roughly three hundred residents, functions as the service base for the entire northeastern volcanic zone. How the basin was made. Around 2,300 years ago a fissure eruption southeast of the present shoreline sent a great volume of basalt, the Younger Laxá lava, down the valley. It dammed the drainage and filled the low ground, and the lake formed on top of the flow. Where hot lava ran over waterlogged ground, steam explosions punched out rings of scoria that look exactly like small volcanoes but never had a magma conduit of their own. These pseudocraters are the signature landform of the district, best seen at Skútustaðir on the southern shore, where two loops of 800 metres and 2.3 kilometres thread between them. The same volcanic plumbing still runs hot: Bjarnarflag east of the lake vents steam at the surface, and the Krafla system 20 kilometres north erupted nine times between 1975 and 1984. The wildlife, which is the real reason it is protected. Mývatn means midge lake, and the name is honest. Non-biting chironomid midges hatch in enormous columns in June and July, and a smaller number of biting blackflies work the outflow of the Laxá. That biomass feeds one of the densest concentrations of breeding ducks anywhere in Europe: thirteen to fifteen species nest here in a normal year, including Barrow's goldeneye, whose only European breeding population lives on this lake and river, plus harlequin duck, long-tailed duck, gadwall and scaup. Iceland passed a dedicated conservation act for Mývatn and the Laxá in 1974, and the wetland was listed under the Ramsar convention in 1977. Diatomite dredging from the lake bed, long a source of local jobs and ecological argument, was finally shut down in 2004. On screen. The Mývatn district was the northern base for Game of Thrones' Icelandic filming, and the material shot within fifteen minutes of the lake supplied much of what audiences read as the lands beyond the Wall. Grjótagjá, on the eastern shore, provided the cave location for Jon Snow and Ygritte in the third season. Dimmuborgir, ten minutes south, became Mance Rayder's wildling camp in the same season. The surrounding lava fields, the pseudocrater ground and the flank of Hverfjall carried establishing shots and travelling sequences. Crews worked here in winter to get natural snow, and the resulting visitor traffic reshaped the local economy: hotels, guiding companies and the small shops in Reykjahlíð all expanded through the 2010s on the back of it. What you actually see today. A circuit of Route 848 around the lake takes half a day at minimum and rewards stops in this order for anyone with limited time: the Skútustaðir pseudocraters for the classic Mývatn landscape; Höfði, a wooded promontory where lava pillars stand in the shallows like a flooded stone garden; Kálfaströnd for the same rocks at closer range; Dimmuborgir; Hverfjall; and Grjótagjá. Vindbelgjarfjall on the western shore, 529 metres, is a steep hour up for the best overview of the whole basin. East of the lake, Námaskarð spreads out grey mud pots and yellow sulphur crusts on a hillside where nothing grows, and the Mývatn Nature Baths opened in 2004 offer a milky, alkaline soak at 36 to 40 degrees with the lake spread out below. Getting there and timing. Route 1 runs along the northern edge of the lake, so Mývatn is a straightforward drive from Akureyri in around ninety minutes and part of the Diamond Circle with Dettifoss, Ásbyrgi and Húsavík. Long-distance buses call at Reykjahlíð in summer. The village has fuel, a supermarket, a swimming pool and several hotels, and it is the last reliable resupply before the eastern highlands. June and July bring midnight light and the heaviest midge swarms, which are harmless but genuinely maddening in still weather, so a head net is worth the few hundred krona. September and early October give calm reflections and the first realistic aurora chances. In winter the ring road stays open but the smaller lake roads drift, and short daylight limits a circuit to the main sights.
✦ May–September · $$
Chapter III · Eastern Region · 23 places
Eastern Region
Stokksnes is a headland on the eastern side of Hornafjörður in southeast Iceland, about ten kilometres by road from the town of Höfn. The Ring Road passes through the Almannaskarð tunnel — opened in 2005, replacing a notoriously steep pass road — and a signed gravel track then runs seaward past a farm gate to the beach. The defining feature is Vestrahorn, a mountain massif rising abruptly to 454 metres at Klifatindur directly behind a black sand strand, with the sea on one side and a shallow lagoon on the other. At low tide the flats between the dunes and the water turn into a mirror, and the whole massif reproduces itself upside down in a centimetre of seawater. It is one of the most photographed compositions in Iceland, and it works because the mountain has no foothills: it goes from sea level to summit ridge in under a kilometre of horizontal distance. The rock is unusual for Iceland. Vestrahorn and its neighbour Brunnhorn are not built of the layered basalt lavas that make up most Icelandic mountains. They belong to an intrusive complex of gabbro and granophyre — coarse-grained rock that crystallised slowly at depth inside an extinct central volcano and was later exposed by erosion, with ages in the region of eight to eleven million years. The practical consequence is visual: the rock is very dark, almost matte black when wet, and it weathers into jagged spires rather than terraces. Brunnhorn, the ridge running out along the spit to the southwest, has acquired the nickname Batman Mountain for the twin peaks that read as a cowl in silhouette. On screen: a Viking village that was never a village. Behind the dunes stands a cluster of timber and turf buildings with a palisade, a hall, outbuildings and a jetty on the sand — a Norse settlement in appearance and a film set in fact. It was built in 2010 for a feature project by the Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur that was never produced, and it has stood ever since as a photographic location maintained by the landowner. Nothing about it is archaeological: no excavation preceded it, no finds underlie it, and its layout follows a production designer's brief rather than an excavated ground plan. Visitors regularly photograph it as a historic site, and it is worth stating plainly that it is not one. The distinction runs through this whole subject. The History Channel's Vikings, the series that shaped the modern popular image of Norse life more than any other, was shot almost entirely in Ireland — at Ashford Studios in County Wicklow, with Lough Tay standing in for the fjord at Kattegat — and has no connection to this beach. Genuine Norse heritage in Iceland lies in written sources and excavated farm sites, not in film sets, however photogenic. The other structures on the headland. The tip of Stokksnes carries a radar station, built by the United States Navy in the mid-1950s and later part of the Iceland Air Defence System operated with NATO. It is fenced and closed to visitors, and its road is signed accordingly; the white radome on the skyline in many photographs belongs to it. The land between the tunnel and the sea is privately owned by the farm at Horn, which runs the Viking Café at the entrance. Access is by ticket bought at the café, generally around a thousand Icelandic krónur, covering the beach, the dune system, the lagoon track and the film set. What the ground is like. The dunes are held together by melgresi, the coarse lyme grass planted across Icelandic sands to stop them moving, and they form low mounds that give foreground structure for photographs and shelter from the wind. The beach sand is fine black basalt, and it holds a shallow film of water for a long time after the tide drops, which is what produces the reflections. Eiders and arctic terns nest along the lagoon in summer — terns will dive at anyone walking near a colony in June and July — and seals haul out on the sandbars of Hornafjörður. In winter the whole headland is a favoured aurora location because the mountain gives a strong silhouette to the north-facing frame and there is no settlement light within ten kilometres. Getting there and timing. Höfn is fifteen minutes away and is the practical base, with fuel, food and rooms; Reykjavík is around 460 kilometres by the south coast, and Egilsstaðir 240 kilometres to the north. The gravel access track is short and usually fine for a standard car, though the last section can flood on a spring tide. Low tide matters more than time of day for the mirror effect, and tide tables for Hornafjörður are published locally. The site sees its heaviest use at sunrise and sunset in autumn, when photographic tour groups converge; midday in summer is often almost empty.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter IV · Capital Region · 20 places
Capital Region
Reykjavik is the world's northernmost national capital, a compact city of colourful corrugated-iron houses clustered around a small harbour on the southwestern coast of Iceland. It serves as the gateway to most of the country's natural attractions while offering a lively cultural scene, geothermally heated outdoor pools, and numerous museums covering Icelandic history and Norse mythology. The city's low skyline gives unobstructed views of Mount Esja across the bay.
✦ year-round · $$
Regions of Iceland
Every place in Iceland
