🇮🇸 Iceland · South coast
There is a corner of Iceland where green and white meet in a way that looks impossible: birch woods, flowering meadows and crystal-clear waterfalls at the foot of ice tongues coming down from the largest glacier in Europe. That place is Skaftafell, a former nature reserve now part of the huge Vatnajökull National Park, in the southeast of the country. Sheltered from the harshest weather by the mountains themselves, Skaftafell has a surprisingly mild microclimate that makes it an oasis of vegetation in the middle of landscapes of ice and black sand.
Its great jewel is Svartifoss, the 'black waterfall': a fall framed by dark hexagonal basalt columns that hang like the pipes of a giant organ or the stalactites of a cave. But Skaftafell is much more: it is the starting point of some of the loveliest walks in Iceland, the place to look out over Vatnajökull's glacier tongues such as Skaftafellsjökull, and the ideal base for the experience of walking on a glacier with crampons, an ice axe and a guide.
This guide covers the essentials of Skaftafell in a practical, friendly way: which trails to choose depending on how much time you have, how to reach Svartifoss and the glacier viewpoints, how to do a walk on the ice safely, where to sleep and eat in an area with few services, and how to combine it with nearby Jökulsárlón. Skaftafell is hiking, ice and silence: one of those places where Iceland shows all its natural grandeur.
Skaftafell was for centuries a farm (one of several in the area) inhabited in an extreme environment, caught between the advance of the Vatnajökull glaciers and the glacial floods (jökulhlaups) caused by eruptions of volcanoes hidden under the ice, such as Grímsvötn. Those jökulhlaups, added to the eruptions of nearby Lakagígar in 1783-1784 (one of the deadliest volcanic catastrophes in Icelandic history), repeatedly devastated the lowlands and isolated the region, which was for a long time cut off from the rest of the country by glacial rivers impossible to cross. Only in 1974, with the completion of the bridge over the Skeiðará and the closing of the Ring Road loop, was Skaftafell connected by road with the rest of Iceland. By then its exceptional nature had already been protected: in 1967 Skaftafell National Park was created, recognising the value of its microclimate, its vegetation and its glacier landscapes. In 2008, Skaftafell was incorporated into the great Vatnajökull National Park, one of the largest in Europe, which protects the glacier of the same name and vast areas around it. In 2019, the whole Vatnajökull area was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list for its exceptional interaction between volcanic fire and glacial ice. The full story 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.
Before the name 'Öræfi' existed (which in Icelandic means literally 'wasteland' or 'barren land'), this whole southeastern region carried a very different name: Litla Hérað, 'the little district'. According to historical sources and the sagas, it was a relatively prosperous district by the standards of medieval Iceland: it is estimated that by the middle of the fourteenth century it had some 40 working farms, many of them on the fertile land now occupied by Vatnajökull National Park, including the area we now know as Skaftafell.
Skaftafell itself was an important estate within that district: in the Middle Ages it functioned as a manor and as the seat of a local assembly (þing), which shows it carried administrative and social weight in the area. In its early centuries, the property belonged to the Church and later passed into the hands of the Danish Crown, reflecting how land tenure in Iceland was, for much of its history, tied to ecclesiastical power and then to Danish colonial rule.
Life in this district revolved around livestock, seasonal fishing and the use of lowlands relatively sheltered by the mountains, at the foot of the imposing Öræfajökull volcano (then called Knappafellsjökull), the highest peak in Iceland. Nobody in the mid fourteenth century could have imagined that the very volcano that gave the region its name and its living was about to wipe it off the map as they knew it.
In 1362, the Öræfajökull volcano — the highest in Iceland at 2,110 metres, and today hidden beneath the Vatnajökull ice cap — produced one of the most violent eruptions in the country's recorded history. It was a Plinian eruption, explosive and brutal, comparable in magnitude to Pinatubo in 1991 or the Krakatoa blast: it threw out on the order of 10 cubic kilometres of tephra (ash and pyroclasts), darkening the sky and burying the district under a rain of incandescent volcanic material.
The impact on Litla Hérað was devastating and practically instantaneous. It is estimated that the eruption destroyed between 20 and 40 farms in the area, killing all their inhabitants and the livestock on the holdings closest to the volcano. Pyroclastic flows and volcanic mudflows (lahars) wiped out the fields and pastures that had sustained the community for generations. By the start of the fifteenth century, of the roughly 40 farms that existed before the catastrophe, barely eight were still inhabited.
It was this cataclysm that gave the region its new name: where people had said Litla Hérað, the survivors and the generations that followed began to call it Öræfi, 'the wasteland', a name still used today and a permanent reminder of the scale of the tragedy. The volcano itself was renamed Öræfajökull ('the glacier of the wasteland'), replacing its earlier name. Curiously, and importantly for Skaftafell's later history, the specific area where the park's visitor centre stands today lay outside the main flow paths of this 1362 eruption (and of the later eruption of 1727), which allowed farming life to continue there in the following centuries, though under the constant shadow of the volcano and its glaciers.
Surviving in Öræfi after 1362 did not mean living at peace with nature. The district remained exposed, century after century, to one of the most feared phenomena in Iceland: jökulhlaups, sudden and colossal glacial floods unleashed when a volcanic eruption happens beneath the Vatnajökull ice — for instance at the subglacial volcano Grímsvötn — and melts enormous volumes of frozen water all at once. Those surges, able to carry blocks of ice the size of buildings, periodically wiped out the fields, destroyed roads and completely changed the course of the rivers running down to the sea, shaping today's black sand plain of Skeiðarársandur.
To that recurring threat was added, in 1783-1784, the eruption of Lakagígar (the 'Laki craters'), the deadliest volcanic episode in the whole of Icelandic history and one of the most lethal in the world in historical times. Although the eruptive focus was further west, the consequences were national: the most extensive lava flows ever recorded in historical times and, above all, a toxic cloud of sulphurous gases (the so-called 'Laki haze') that poisoned pastures and livestock across much of the country. The resulting famine, known as the Móðuharðindin ('the hard hardships of the haze'), killed around a fifth of Iceland's population and up to 80% of its livestock, hitting the already vulnerable communities of the southeast particularly hard.
These repeated events — eruptions, jökulhlaups, famines — increasingly isolated Öræfi and Skaftafell from the rest of Iceland. The glacial rivers crossing Skeiðarársandur were, for much of the year, impossible or extremely dangerous to ford, and there was no bridge across them. For centuries, this southeastern district lived practically cut off by land, relying on seasonal routes and local knowledge of the terrain for any journey towards the rest of the country.
The great change for Skaftafell and the whole Öræfi district came only in the twentieth century, in two interwoven stages. The first was the recognition of the area's exceptional natural value: as early as 1960 a formal proposal was made to declare Skaftafell a national park, in view of its singular microclimate — sheltered from the harshest winds by the mountains themselves — which allowed birch woods, flowering meadows and lush vegetation right at the foot of the glaciers, a contrast found almost nowhere else in the country. On 15 September 1967, Skaftafell was officially declared a National Park, Iceland's second after Þingvellir, and the local farmer Ragnar Stefánsson, of the Hæðir farm, became the first ranger.
The second stage, no less decisive, was the physical connection with the rest of the country. Until the early 1970s, crossing the treacherous Skeiðarársandur was still a risky undertaking, with no bridges over the many arms of the glacial river Skeiðará. Only in 1974 was the bridge over the Skeiðará completed, the last missing piece to close the full loop of the Ring Road (Route 1), the road that circles the whole of Iceland. With that bridge, Skaftafell and the whole Öræfi region were connected by road with Reykjavík and the rest of the country permanently for the first time, ending centuries of relative isolation.
That same bridge, however, would star in another dramatic episode in the turbulent relationship between this land and its volcanoes: in 1996, a subglacial eruption of the Grímsvötn volcano unleashed a jökulhlaup of colossal proportions that wiped out much of the infrastructure across Skeiðarársandur, including the metal structures of the original bridge, twisted by the force of the water and the ice. Today, the remains of those girders are preserved as a monument beside Route 1, a physical and forceful reminder of the power of nature in this region.
Skaftafell National Park, as created in 1967, operated independently for four decades, establishing itself as one of the most visited natural destinations in Iceland thanks to its unique combination of accessible hiking, waterfalls, woods and direct views over the tongues of Vatnajökull. But on 7 June 2008 a major institutional change took place: Skaftafell was absorbed, along with the former Jökulsárgljúfur National Park (in the north of the country, home to the Dettifoss waterfall), into the creation of the new and far larger Vatnajökull National Park (Vatnajökulsþjóðgarður).
This new park, which became the largest in Europe by area, protects not only the Vatnajökull glacier itself — the largest by volume on the continent — but also the vast peripheral areas where the ice meets volcanic landscapes, canyons, waterfalls and black sand plains. Within this new structure, Skaftafell became one of the park's main 'areas' or management districts, keeping its identity and its Visitor Centre as the preferred gateway for a good share of the tourists driving the Ring Road.
International recognition came in 2019, when UNESCO inscribed Vatnajökull National Park on its World Heritage List, explicitly highlighting the exceptional interaction between active volcanism and glacial dynamics that characterises this region: the same processes — eruptions under the ice, jökulhlaups, the retreat and advance of the glacier tongues — that for centuries were a deadly threat to the inhabitants of Öræfi are today valued as a natural laboratory unique on the planet for understanding the interaction between fire and ice. Today, walking to Svartifoss or looking out over the front of Skaftafellsjökull is also, in a way, walking over seven hundred years of a history marked by catastrophe, resilience and, finally, the protection of an unrepeatable landscape.