🇮🇸 Iceland · South coast
For many people Jökulsárlón is the most striking image of Iceland: a lagoon of turquoise blue water with enormous blocks of ice drifting across it, calved from the glacier. Those icebergs break off the tongue of the Breiðamerkurjökull, sail slowly towards the sea and, along the way, change shape and colour: white, electric blue, and some with black streaks of volcanic ash trapped in the ice for centuries. It is a silent spectacle in permanent motion, where every so often a block turns over with a dull crack.
What is most astonishing is that this lagoon is very young: it did not exist a hundred years ago. It only began to form around 1930-40, when the glacier started to retreat and left behind a hollow that gradually filled with meltwater. It has not stopped growing since, because the glacier keeps shrinking. Jökulsárlón is, literally, the postcard of climate change: beautiful and unsettling at the same time, a place that gets bigger year after year as the ice melts.
This guide tells you how to visit with your head on the practical side: how to get there on the Ring Road (and why it is not worth doing as a day trip from Reykjavík), when the boat trips run and what they really cost in krónur, what the Diamond Beach opposite is, where to see the seals, and how to combine it with the rest of the south coast. With verified data, real prices and no waffle.
Jökulsárlón did not exist a century ago. The lagoon was born around 1934-35, when the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier, which during the Little Ice Age had advanced almost to the sea and wiped out farms, began to retreat as the climate warmed. The melting ice left a hollow that filled with water, and so the lake appeared. Since the 1970s it has quadrupled in size and today it covers about 25 km² and reaches 284 metres deep, which makes it the deepest lake in Iceland. Its growth even threatens the Route 1 bridge. In 2017 the Icelandic state bought the farm at Fell, which included the lagoon, to protect it, and today it is part of Vatnajökull National Park. Its beauty made it a location for James Bond, Batman and Lara Croft films. The full story, with dates and figures, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The strip where ice and fire touch: farms planted at the foot of glacier-capped volcanoes, the sudden floods known as jökulhlaup, the retreat of Vatnajökull and the Jökulsárlón lagoon, the village of Vík in the shadow of the fearsome Katla, and the highlands of Landmannalaugar.
Read the history of South coast →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Almost every place you visit on a trip has been there for centuries. Jökulsárlón has not. Iceland's most famous glacier lagoon is younger than many of the grandparents of the people photographing it: it only began to form around 1934-35. Before that, where the icebergs float today there was no lake but ice: the front of the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier, which reached almost to the Atlantic coast.
To understand its birth you have to look at the great ice cap that feeds it. Vatnajökull is the largest glacier in Iceland and in Europe by volume: it covers around 8% of the country and exceeds 900 metres in thickness at some points. Dozens of outlet glaciers descend from its edges, slow rivers of ice heading for the lowlands. One of them is Breiðamerkurjökull, which comes down to the south, towards the sea. It is that tongue which, as it melted and retreated, left behind the hollow that is now the lagoon.
The name says it all: Jökulsárlón means, in Icelandic, 'the lagoon of the glacial river'. The Jökulsá á Breiðamerkursandi river connects the lagoon with the ocean over a very short stretch, barely a few hundred metres, through which the icebergs eventually escape to the Atlantic. That river is, in fact, one of the shortest in Iceland and at the same time one of those discharging the most water.
That such an imposing landscape should be so recent makes it unique: it is not a postcard frozen in time but a place that changed radically in less than a century and keeps changing every year. Jökulsárlón is visible proof, on a human scale, of how climate transforms geography.
To get to the lagoon you have to go back a few centuries, to a time when the ice did the opposite of what it does today: it grew. Between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, much of the northern hemisphere went through what scientists call the Little Ice Age, a period of colder temperatures. In Iceland that meant the glaciers advanced, and Breiðamerkurjökull was one of those that grew most.
When the first Norse settlers arrived in Iceland, around the year 870, the glacier tongue was far further inland: its front is estimated to have been some 20 km further north than it is today. Between that tongue and the sea lay a fertile plain, the region of Breiðamörk ('the broad forest'), where there were farms and settlements. The area was habitable and productive.
With the cold of the Little Ice Age, the glacier advanced relentlessly southwards. It covered grazing land and buried farms under ice and moraine. By the late nineteenth century, the front of Breiðamerkurjökull had reached almost to the coast: only a narrow strip of sand (the sandur) was left between the ice and the Atlantic waves. The land that had once fed whole families had disappeared under the glacier.
That was the high point. From the late nineteenth century and, above all, the twentieth, the climate began to warm and the process reversed: the glacier that had advanced for centuries began to retreat. And as it retreated, it set the stage for the lagoon to be born.
The warming of the climate between the 1920s and 1960s accelerated the retreat of Breiðamerkurjökull. As it melted, the ice exposed a deep basin that the glacier itself had carved into the ground during its advance. That depression began to fill with meltwater, and so, around 1934-35, Jökulsárlón appeared. At first it was a small lake, barely a pool at the foot of the ice.
It has not stopped growing since, because the glacier keeps retreating (its front is estimated to pull back around 200 metres a year). The figures speak for themselves: in 1975 the lagoon measured about 8 km², and today it runs to around 25 km², more than four times as much in half a century. It is also the deepest lake in Iceland: in 2009 depths of up to 284 metres were measured in the sector where the glacier front used to be, with an average close to 153 metres.
The lagoon works as a constant iceberg factory. The glacier front ends up floating on deep water, and so it breaks easily: large blocks detach (a process called calving), fall into the lagoon and drift. They move slowly towards the mouth that connects with the sea, pushed by the wind and the tides, melting and changing shape as they go. Some take years to cross the lagoon; others reach the Atlantic and come back to the shore, to the Diamond Beach.
All this spectacle has an unsettling side: it is the direct image of climate change. The lagoon is beautiful precisely because the glacier is dying. Every summer the front retreats a little more, the lagoon grows, and what today is water was ice not long ago. Jökulsárlón has become, without setting out to, one of the global symbols of glacier retreat.
The lagoon's growth is not just a pretty fact for tourists: it brings a very concrete engineering problem. Route 1, the Ring Road, the only road that circles the whole of Iceland and links the southeast with the rest of the country, passes right in front of Jökulsárlón. And exactly there, over the short river that connects the lagoon with the sea, is a bridge. That bridge is at risk.
As the sea erodes the mouth of the lagoon and it widens, the current flowing out to the Atlantic becomes stronger and undermines the shore and the bridge piers. On top of that, drifting icebergs can hit the structure. To protect the road, the Icelandic authorities built defences: a dyke and large stone blocks that slow the erosion and deflect the ice. Even so, the sea's advance towards the lagoon is a permanent concern, and long-term solutions are being studied so the Ring Road is not cut at that point.
The lagoon has also been at the centre of a curious ownership story. For decades, the land where Jökulsárlón sits belonged to a private farm, the Fell farm. As the place had become one of the country's biggest tourist attractions (with hundreds of thousands of visitors a year), in the 2010s there were fears that it might end up in the hands of private or foreign investors, with the risk that admission would be charged or that it would be exploited without control.
To prevent that, in 2017 the Icelandic state bought the part of the Fell farm that includes the lagoon, after a process that stirred considerable public debate about who should own such an emblematic natural site. That same year, the area was incorporated into Vatnajökull National Park, one of the largest in Europe, giving it legal protection. Today Jökulsárlón is public property and access remains free.
The unreal beauty of Jökulsárlón did not go unnoticed by the film industry. Its landscape of floating icebergs served as a location for Hollywood productions long before mass tourism reached Iceland. Two James Bond films passed through the lagoon — 'A View to a Kill' (1985) and 'Die Another Day' (2002), where 007 drives on the ice — along with 'Lara Croft: Tomb Raider' (2001), 'Batman Begins' (2005) and several more. Those appearances helped put the lagoon on the world tourism map.
Tourism at the lagoon, however, began earlier and modestly. The first commercial boat trips started in 1985; in the summer of 1987 barely 5,000 people a year sailed the lagoon. Over time, and with the Icelandic tourism boom of the 2010s, the figure shot up: today the amphibious boats (vehicles that drive down to the water and sail among the ice) carry tens of thousands of passengers each season, and the lagoon is one of the obligatory stops on any tour of the south coast.
Beyond the figures, Jökulsárlón is also a wildlife sanctuary. Harbour seals come in from the sea and you see them swimming among the blocks of ice or resting on them, especially near the mouth to the Atlantic. In summer, the area fills with seabirds: Arctic terns, which make one of the longest migrations on the planet, and Arctic skuas. The icebergs that reach the sea and return to shore form, opposite, the famous Diamond Beach, where the clear ice glints on the black sand.
So, in less than a century, a corner that was once land of farms buried by ice turned first into a lagoon, then into a film location and finally into one of the most visited and photographed landscapes in Iceland. A place that keeps growing and changing every year, quietly reminding us how fast the planet's ice is melting.