🇮🇸 Iceland · South coast
Landmannalaugar is one of those places that look like another planet: an amphitheatre of rhyolite hills painted yellow, ochre, pink, green and black, crossed by lava fields, columns of steam rising from the ground and a natural hot spring where you can float surrounded by mountains. It is in the heart of the Icelandic Highlands, the uninhabited volcanic interior of the country, and it is the starting point of the Laugavegur, considered one of the best trekking trails in the world.
But getting there comes with small print, and it is important to understand it before you get excited: Landmannalaugar is in the Highlands and can only be reached on F-roads, those unpaved mountain routes that legally require a 4x4 and that include fording rivers with no bridge. Ordinary car insurance covers neither F-roads nor driving through water. Renting a small car and going anyway is, literally, how many tourists wreck their vehicle and lose their cover. Fortunately there is a simple solution: the highland buses that go up from Reykjavík in summer.
This guide explains straightforwardly how to actually get there (highland bus or a proper 4x4, with the right insurance), when the road opens, which walks to do among the coloured hills, how the hot spring and the touring club hut work, and what precautions to take with weather that changes in minutes. With verified data and real prices in krónur, so the adventure goes well.
Landmannalaugar's incredible colours come from its geology: it sits on the Torfajökull volcano, whose great eruption of 1477 formed the Laugahraun lava field and left the largest expanse of rhyolite rock in Iceland, that silica-rich stone that paints the hills yellow, pink and green. For centuries, the area was grazing land: farmers took their sheep up to the mountain pastures in summer and brought them down in autumn in the réttir, the traditional round-up. The hot spring was already a place where people and drovers bathed. In 1927 Ferðafélag Íslands (the Icelandic Touring Association) was founded and built huts in the area, and over the years the Laugavegur trek to Þórsmörk was born, formalised as a route in 1978. The full story, with dates and names, 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.
When you first see the hills of Landmannalaugar — yellow, pink, green, ochre, almost as if someone had painted them in watercolours — the inevitable question is: why are they those colours? The answer is under your feet, in one of the most singular volcanic systems in Iceland: Torfajökull.
Torfajökull is not a cone-shaped volcano but an enormous system with a large caldera of some 18 by 12 kilometres, whose volcanic centre formed at least 384,000 years ago. Its most extraordinary feature is that it produced the largest expanse of rhyolite rock in all of Iceland: about 450 km² of exposed rhyolite. Rhyolite is a silica-rich volcanic rock, and that is the secret of the colours. Unlike the black basalt that dominates almost all of Iceland, rhyolite can have pale tones, and when combined with geothermal alteration — the hot steam and gases rising from below transform the minerals — you get the yellows of sulphur, the reds and ochres of iron, the greens and the pinks. Each hill is, at bottom, a chemical map of what happened underground.
Torfajökull is also home to Iceland's largest geothermal system, some 150 km², with temperatures that in the most active zones exceed 340 °C at depth. That energy is what heats the famous hot spring where visitors bathe today, and what keeps the slopes of hills such as Brennisteinsalda, the 'sulphur wave', steaming. Landmannalaugar is not just a pretty place: it is the visible surface of a giant caldera that is still alive.
The present landscape of Landmannalaugar carries the signature of one particular eruption: the one of around 1477. It was one of the largest silicic eruptive episodes in Iceland's recent history. From a fissure extending many kilometres north of the Torfajökull caldera came lava flows that are still there today, black and twisted, forming the fields that surround the place.
The most famous of those flows is the Laugahraun, the lava field that reaches right up to the edge of where the hut stands today. 'Laugahraun' means 'lava of the hot springs', and walking on it is a strange experience: blocks of dark lava and obsidian (the black, shiny volcanic glass that forms when silica-rich lava cools very fast) scattered at the foot of the coloured hills. Other flows from the same eruption, such as the Námshraun and the Stútshraun, complete that sea of volcanic stone.
This eruption explains why the contrast at Landmannalaugar is so stark: recent black lava beside much older multicoloured rhyolite, with steam from the fumaroles slipping between them. It is geology in an almost pure state, with barely any vegetation to cover it, because in the Highlands the climate is so harsh that plants hardly take hold.
Torfajökull has not erupted with that force since, but it is not an extinct volcano: its last major eruptions were separated by intervals of about 900 years, and the system is still very geothermally active. Every column of steam you see at Landmannalaugar is a reminder that the fire is only sleeping under those colours.
Before it was a world trekking destination, Landmannalaugar was, for centuries, a place of work for Icelandic farmers. Its very name tells you: 'Landmannalaugar' means something like 'the baths of the people of the Land district' (Landmenn), the farming region to the south, in the lowlands. That is, the hot springs of the people of Land.
In Iceland, the livestock tradition was based on releasing sheep in summer to graze freely in the highland pastures, far from the farms. The animals spent the warm months loose on the mountain, fattening up on the high grass. Landmannalaugar, with its valleys and its water, was one of those summer grazing areas, and also a meeting and resting point: the drovers who came up to check on the livestock made use of the hot spring to bathe, just as tourists do today. The thermal bathe is not a modern invention for visitors: it is a very old use of the place.
Every autumn came the most important moment in the rural calendar: the réttir, the great round-up in which the sheep were brought down from the mountain. Riders on horseback and dogs criss-crossed the Highlands for days gathering the scattered animals and driving them towards the pens (the réttir proper), where each farmer separated their sheep from the neighbours' by the marks on their ears. The réttir was, and in many parts of Iceland still is, a community celebration, with hard work, reunions and tradition. That pastoral life was, for generations, the only reason people went up to somewhere as remote and inhospitable as Landmannalaugar.
The shift from grazing land to hiking mecca has one clear protagonist: Ferðafélag Íslands, the Icelandic Touring Association, founded in 1927. At a time when Iceland was still a poor country with terrible roads, a group of mountain enthusiasts set out to open the country's interior to anyone who wanted to travel it on foot, building refuges and marking trails in areas where there was absolutely nothing.
Ferðafélag Íslands (which Icelanders shorten to FÍ) gradually built a network of mountain huts across the Highlands, among them the one at Landmannalaugar. Those huts, simple but vital, let walkers spend the night under shelter in an environment where the weather can kill: refuges with bunks, a communal kitchen and little else, but enough to make crossing remote areas possible. To this day it is FÍ that runs most of the refuges and campsites at Landmannalaugar and along the Laugavegur trek, with a system of hut wardens in summer.
Over the decades, and above all with better access and the boom in nature tourism, Landmannalaugar went from being a secret among Icelandic hikers to a destination known around the world. Today it is protected within the Fjallabak Nature Reserve, a designation that seeks to preserve this unique volcanic Highland territory against the pressure of tourism. The fragility of the place is real: the moss and high-altitude vegetation take decades to recover from a single footstep off the trail, and that is why people insist so much on not leaving the marked paths.
Landmannalaugar's great leap to international fame came through a trail: the Laugavegur, the crossing of some 54-55 kilometres linking Landmannalaugar with the glacial valley of Þórsmörk. The route was formalised as a marked trail in 1978, when Ferðafélag Íslands finished connecting and signposting the way between its huts at Landmannalaugar, Hrafntinnusker, Álftavatn and Emstrur (Botnar), down to Þórsmörk.
The appeal of the Laugavegur is the incredible variety of landscapes it crosses in a few days: it starts among the coloured rhyolite hills and lava fields of Landmannalaugar, climbs to its highest point at Hrafntinnusker (at about 1,050 metres, between snow and steaming geothermal areas), passes lakes such as Álftavatn, crosses glacial rivers and black sand deserts, and ends in the green oasis of Þórsmörk, ringed by glaciers. Few trails in the world offer such diversity in so little distance.
That singularity did not go unnoticed: in 2012, National Geographic magazine included the Laugavegur among the twenty best trails on the planet. Today tens of thousands of people walk it every summer — estimates speak of between 75,000 and 100,000 a year across the route — making it the most popular trek in Iceland. It is usually done in three or four days, north to south, sleeping in the FÍ huts, which in high season are booked a very long way ahead.
So, in less than a century, Landmannalaugar completed a remarkable transformation: from the thermal bathe of sheep drovers and a remote grazing spot to the gateway of one of the most admired trails in the world. And yet much of its magic is still the same as it was centuries ago: getting into the hot spring, with the mountain cold on your face and the coloured hills around you, after a long day on the trail.