Visit Thingvellir

First impressions of Thingvellir

Thingvellir (Þingvellir, 'the assembly plains') is the spiritual heart of Iceland and one of the most geologically extraordinary places on Earth. The park sits squarely in the rift valley of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge — the only place above water where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are visibly drifting apart at about 2 cm a year, and you can walk between two literal continents through the dramatic Almannagjá gorge. It was here, on a natural rock platform called the Lögberg ('Law Rock'), that the chieftains of Iceland's Viking settler families gathered each summer for two weeks starting in AD 930 to make laws and resolve disputes — the world's first functioning parliament. The Alpingi met continuously at Thingvellir for 868 years until 1798, when the assembly moved to Reykjavík. Walk the Almannagjá trail with the cliffs of the North American plate towering on one side, visit the Lögberg and the small black wooden church (1859), and finish at the brilliantly clear glacial fissure Silfra — the underwater divide between the two continents, where divers and snorkellers swim in 2°C, 100-metre-visibility water. The Oxarárfoss waterfall framed by the gorge is one of Iceland's most photogenic.