Visit Golden Circle

About Golden Circle

The Golden Circle is the route every first-time Iceland visitor takes, and rightly so — it packs three of the country's most extraordinary natural phenomena into a single 230km loop accessible year-round from Reykjavík. Þingvellir National Park (the first stop, 45 minutes northeast of the capital) is where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates pull apart at about 2cm a year; you can walk down through the rift in the Almannagjá gorge between the two continents. Þingvellir is also where Iceland's parliament — the Alpingi, the oldest in the world — first met in AD 930, making the site UNESCO-listed and the spiritual heart of the Icelandic nation. The Geysir geothermal area, 50km on, has the original Great Geysir (now mostly dormant) and its more reliable neighbour Strokkur, which erupts a 20-metre column of steam and water every 5–10 minutes (eerily reliable). Finally, the spectacular two-tier Gullfoss waterfall ('the golden falls') on the Húvítá river drops 32 metres into a hidden gorge — the spray catches the light, especially in winter, with the surrounding glaciated landscape framing the whole thing. The classic loop adds a stop at the Faxi waterfall and the Kerid volcanic crater.