Iceland Waterfalls: The Most Spectacular Falls to Visit

It’s easy to picture Iceland as a country of ice and lava alone, until you round a bend on the Ring Road and the ground starts to shake with the roar of falling water. Few countries pack so much drama into so small an area, and nowhere is that more obvious than at its Iceland waterfalls, which range from thundering giants to quiet horseshoe curves tucked into fjords few visitors ever reach. This guide picks out the falls worth building a trip around, and where each one sits on the map.

Whether you’re chasing the biggest names on the Golden Circle, the most powerful cascade in Europe, or something further off the beaten track in the Westfjords, Iceland’s waterfalls in Iceland cover every kind of spectacle a traveller could want. Know which falls suit which route, and you’ll spend your trip standing in the mist rather than driving past it.

Gullfoss, the Golden Circle’s golden falls

No list of Icelandic waterfalls starts anywhere but Gullfoss, the two-tiered Gullfoss waterfall that plunges a combined 32 metres into a narrow canyon on the Golden Circle route, around 116km northeast of Reykjavík. The Hvítá River drops 11 metres over a broad shelf, turns sharply, then falls a further 21 metres into the gorge below – on a sunny day, the spray catches the light and turns a hazy gold, which is how the falls got their name. It’s one of the most-visited sights in the country, and for good reason: three viewing platforms let you get close enough to feel the ground tremble. If you’re planning around it, our guide to the best time to visit Iceland covers how the falls, and the rest of the Golden Circle, change with the seasons.

Skógafoss and the south coast’s curtain of water

Head south instead and Skógafoss delivers a different kind of spectacle: a single, uninterrupted 60-metre curtain, 25 metres wide, dropping straight off a former sea cliff near the village of Skógar. The Skogafoss waterfall is one of the most beautiful in the country precisely because of that simplicity – no tiers, no channels, just a wall of water you can walk right up to. The spray is near-constant, and on clear mornings it throws up rainbows, sometimes doubled, across the base of the falls. A staircase of around 400 steps climbs the eastern slope to a platform looking straight down the lip, and from there a trail continues toward the Fimmvörðuháls pass for anyone with a full day to spare.

Dettifoss, Europe’s most powerful waterfall

In the north, inside Vatnajökull National Park, Dettifoss trades height for sheer force. The Dettifoss waterfall drops 44 metres across a 100-metre-wide ledge, and is widely reckoned the second most powerful waterfall in Europe by volume, after the Rhine Falls. The Jökulsá á Fjöllum river carries glacial sediment that turns the water a pale grey-white, and the noise alone is enough to signal you’re close before the canyon comes into view. It’s a fair way from Reykjavík, so most visitors take it in as part of a wider North Iceland loop, alongside quieter falls further downstream on the same river.

Godafoss, the waterfall of the gods

Further along that same northern route sits Godafoss, smaller in scale but heavier in history. The Godafoss waterfall curves in a 12-metre horseshoe across 30 metres of the Skjálfandafljót river, and takes its name – “waterfall of the gods” – from a story dating to around 1000 AD, when Iceland’s lawspeaker is said to have thrown statues of the old Norse gods into the falls after the country adopted Christianity. It’s an easy stop just off the Ring Road near Akureyri, with a short loop trail that lets you view the falls from both banks.

Dynjandi and the quiet drama of the Westfjords

For the falls fewer visitors ever reach, the Westfjords hold the Dynjandi waterfall, a trapezoidal cascade that widens as it falls – 30 metres across at the top, 60 metres at the base – for a total drop of around 100 metres, making it the largest waterfall in the region and, by many accounts, one of the most beautiful waterfalls in Iceland. Six smaller falls step down the hillside beneath it, and the hike up alongside them is one of the most rewarding short walks in the country. If your route brings you back through the south on the way to or from the Westfjords, it’s worth pairing the trip with an underground detour: an Iceland lava tunnel tour near Reykjavík takes you beneath the surface, walking the path of a lava flow that shaped the landscape thousands of years before any of these waterfalls existed.

Planning around the falls

Between the Golden Circle, the south coast, the north and the Westfjords, seeing Iceland’s headline waterfalls properly means covering real distances, so it’s worth building a route around them rather than treating each as a separate day trip. Travelodeal can help put together the right Iceland holidays for that route, matching flights and a hire car to however many of these falls you want to fit in – leaving you free to focus on which ones make your final list.

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