Millions of people drive the Golden Circle every year. The version they get is tidy: a 300-kilometer loop from Reykjavík, three famous stops — a rift valley, a geyser, a waterfall — a photo at each, back in the city by dinner. None of it is wrong, exactly. But almost none of those visitors know the history of the land they are driving through.

I was born and raised in Biskupstungur, the farming district that holds both Geysir and Gullfoss. I spent my first twenty years here, and the decades since running a business in the district — which, in a place this size, means being involved with everyone: the farmers, the landowners, the families I went to school with. My father came to this district in 1935. Between his memory and mine, our family has watched this land for more than ninety years: the hayfields behind the parking lots, the sheep gathered every autumn, the neighbors, the funerals, the deals sealed with a handshake because paper would have felt like an insult. The tour buses drive through a landscape. I know it as a community.

This page is my attempt to write some of it down before it thins out. Call it a living archive: my family’s memories, our photographs going back to the 1940s, and documented local history from newspapers, annals, and survey records. My rule is simple. Where a story stands in the written record, I say so. Where it rests on memory — mine, my father’s, our neighbors’ — I say that too. A surprising amount of what the English-language sources repeat about these places is wrong, and I intend to correct it here, one story at a time.

The couple at the top of this page were photographed at Syðri-Reykir, the farm where my father worked. I don’t know who they are — perhaps someone reading this does. Behind them stand the mountains of the Golden Circle, and the notch in the ridge is Brúarárskörð, where the Brúará gathers before it runs down to Brúarfoss. Photographs like this are what this archive is made of.

I will keep adding to this page as new stories are ready. Here are the first four.

Strokkur’s Secret 1963 Reboot: The Drill That Brought Strokkur Back to Life

Strokkur in everyone’s photographs — erupting on schedule, every few minutes, all day long — spent most of a century as a hole in the ground. The earthquakes of 1896 rearranged its underground plumbing, and Strokkur went quiet. For sixty-seven years it sat there, a rubble-choked shaft that visitors walked past on their way to the great Geysir, which by then was barely erupting either.

Then, in July 1963, the Geysir Committee brought in a drill. A 39.4-meter borehole was sunk down through the blocked channel, and Strokkur came back to life. It has hardly paused since. The reliability that everyone credits to nature is, in part, engineering — and the locals have always known it. The full article tells the story properly: the silent decades, the committee and the drill, and why almost nobody mentions any of it today.

Read the full story: the 1963 drilling that brought Strokkur back →

Peningagjá in 1947: When the Money Fissure Was a Working Road

The hay transport, 1947. Húnbogi Hafliðason on the left; the man on the right is not yet identified. Photographed by my father. Family archive.

At Þingvellir, the guides tell Peningagjá as a wishing well: drop a coin into the clear water, watch it flash all the way down, make a wish. They will tell you the custom goes back to the Danish king’s visit in 1907, and that part is true enough.

What they don’t tell you is what happened after the king went home. For decades this was not a monument — it was a route, part of the working landscape that farmers crossed with animals and machinery. In 1947, in the middle of the rationing years, my father and Húnbogi Hafliðason drove a fully loaded hay truck over the fissure. Nobody was throwing money into the water that day; people were counting it. The full article follows Peningagjá from royal spectacle to farm road and back — and what that says about how quickly a place can be reinvented for visitors.

Read the full story: the real history of the Money Fissure →

Brúarfoss and the Broken Bridge: The 1602 Story Behind the Name

Brúarfoss, around 1950 — photographed by my father, long before the internet found the color. Family archive.

Brúarfoss is the waterfall people cross the world to photograph for its color — a deep, almost unreal blue that comes from spring-fed water, not glacial melt, whatever the captions say. But the name has nothing to do with the color. Brúarfoss means “bridge falls,” and there really was a bridge: a natural stone arch that once spanned the river.

In 1602, during a famine, a steward of the Skálholt estate had that bridge deliberately broken — to stop starving, displaced people from crossing the river and reaching the bishop’s seat. The arch was never restored. The name stayed. Every visitor who says “Brúarfoss” today is repeating the memory of something destroyed on purpose. The full article traces the bridge, the famine, and the thousand-year road that died in 1961.

Read the full story: Brúarfoss and the broken bridge →

The Hvítá River and the Brattholt Handshake: Rent Paid in Salmon

Gullfoss, photographed by my father. Family archive.

In the 1980s and 90s, my father and I fished for salmon in the Hvítá river, just south of Gullfoss. The stretch belonged to the farmer at Brattholt, and our rent was not a number. It was every third salmon we caught. No contract, no invoice, no reminder ever needed. That was the entire agreement, and it held for years.

I include this story not because anything dramatic happened — it didn’t — but because it shows how this district actually ran. Trust was the currency, and a man’s word carried further than his signature. The full article is about that stretch of river, the farm below the falls, and a way of doing business that never needed paper.

Read the full story: Gullfoss, Brattholt and the Hvítá →

More Stories Are Coming

There are more stories from this district than one page can hold — some standing in written records, some living only in the memory of people I can still call. I publish each one when it is checked, dated, and where possible, photographed. If the Golden Circle is on your route, read a few of these first. The road looks different when you know what happened beside it.

Most people see Brúarfoss — often written Bruarfoss — before they hear the name. It is one of the images Iceland travels on: pale blue water folding into a narrow rift in dark rock, photographed from a small wooden footbridge between Laugarvatn and Geysir.

Almost nobody standing on that footbridge knows they are standing at a road.

For something close to a thousand years this was a crossing — the place where you got over Brúará and into the district beyond. It is the reason the river has the name it has, the reason the waterfall has the name it has, the reason a famine in 1602 turned violent here, and the reason a Danish king and two parliaments came through in 1907. The waterfall itself was incidental to all of it. Nobody came to look at the water. They came because this was the way across.

Then in 1961 the crossing moved four to five kilometres downstream, and Brúarfoss went quiet for fifty years — until photographs found it, and nobody who came knew it had ever been anything but a view.

Start with the question most people actually arrive with, because the answer is also the reason any of this happened.

Brúará is not a glacial river. It is spring-fed, rising out of the ground at Rótarsandur, and the water reaching Brúarfoss has never been near Langjökull — a detail most descriptions get wrong.

That is the whole explanation for the colour. A glacial river carries suspended rock flour and runs opaque grey-green. Brúará runs clear, and what you are looking at is clean water over dark volcanic rock, with the depth of the rift concentrating the blue. It is the opposite process from glacial milk, which is why Brúará looks like this while Hvítá, a short distance east, does not.

The geologist Guðmundur Kjartansson, who studied this stretch of river closely in the 1940s, called Brúará one of the most pronounced spring rivers of its size in the whole country. It never rises violently, and it does not freeze until well below Brúarfoss. Its flow, he wrote, is exceptionally steady whatever the weather does.

Which is also why there had to be a crossing. A glacial river swells with summer melt and falls away in autumn; sooner or later you can wade it. Brúará does not oblige. A river like that either stops you or gets bridged.

At the falls it was bridged, by the river itself. A natural stone arch spanned the water where it narrows into the rift.

The older form of the name is Brúarárfoss — the waterfall of Brúará. And Brúará means bridge-river.

Read that in order and it tells you the whole history. The crossing came first. The river was named after the crossing. The waterfall was named after the river.

So the most famous natural feature on this stretch of water is named, at one remove, after a piece of infrastructure. English descriptions usually collapse this into a single step and end up muddling what was named after what. The extra syllable in the older form is the giveaway.

Biskupstungur is the tongue of land between Brúará on the west and Tungufljót on the east. The district is defined by its water — which means a crossing on Brúará is not a convenience. It is the door.

Landnámabók records that Ketilbjörn the Old came from Naumudalur in Norway in a ship called Elliði, landed at the river mouth in Reykjavík that still carries the ship’s name, and rode inland looking for land. He claimed all of Grímsnes up from Höskuldslækur, all of Laugardalur and the whole of Biskupstunga up to Stakksá, and settled at Mosfell. His son was Teitur, his grandson Gissur the White, and his great-grandson Ísleifur — the first bishop of Iceland, at Skálholt, downstream on this same river.

So from very early on, the crossing at Brúarfoss belonged to whoever held the land beyond it. For most of the following centuries, that was Skálholt.

You only bother to destroy a bridge that people are using.

The oldest written account comes from Jón Halldórsson of Hítardalur, in his Biskupasögur. In the hard years around 1602, he says, destitute and displaced people were coming to Skálholt from every direction in great numbers. The steward of the estate judged that the pressure would ease if the natural stone arch on Brúará — the one the river was named for — were broken. He had it done with a work crew, with the knowledge, if not the counsel, of the bishop’s wife Helga Jónsdóttir, but without the knowledge of Bishop Oddur, who took it very badly when he learned of it. The steward drowned in Brúará shortly afterwards.

Jón Halldórsson was born in 1665 and came to school at Skálholt in 1679, roughly seventy-seven years after the events he describes. Close enough that the account is unlikely to be invented, far enough that the detail cannot be leaned on too hard.

Three things the usual account gets wrong

The direction of travel. The story is usually told as starving peasants being blocked from reaching fertile church land. The oldest source says the opposite. People were flocking to Skálholt, and the point was to reduce the number arriving at the door.

Who did it. Not the Church as an institution, and not on the bishop’s orders. A household official acting on his own judgement, against the wishes of a bishop who found out afterwards.

Which church. Skálholt is often described in English in terms that read as Catholic. By 1602 the Reformation was half a century old and Skálholt was a Lutheran seat.

And the arch is still there

This is the part that is missing from every English account, and it is not a legend.

There is a stone arch across Brúará at the falls today. Few people notice it, because it lies under the water. Guðmundur Kjartansson, who published a study of it in Náttúrufæðingurinn in 1948, had been to the spot seven or eight times and could always make it out through the white water breaking over it. Between the waves, he reckoned, it is barely knee-deep. In very low water the river is said to run entirely under the arch except for the surf, and it has been claimed that a man once took his chance and ran across the river on it.

I first heard this from Óskar at Brekka, whose farm sits on the old road to this crossing. He told it as it is told in the district: that Skálholt’s men did not destroy the arch at all, but broke enough off the top of it to put the crossing out of use — and that what is left is still down there.

Guðmundur considered exactly that explanation and did not accept it. His view was that the arch now in the river is unbroken, sits too low to have ever served as a crossing, and that taking the top off it would have been work too difficult and too dangerous for 1602 tools. He thought the original stood a little upstream, where the fissure narrows to about a metre across and only thirty centimetres at water level.

So the district and the geologist disagree, and both accounts are careful ones. What neither disputes is that a natural stone bridge crossed this river here, that it was deliberately put out of use in a famine year, and that something of it is still under the water.

One honest caution on the story itself. Broken stone arches recur as a motif in Icelandic folklore — Brúarhlöð on Hvítá carries essentially the same tale, and there are others. The named individuals and the estate setting give the Brúará account more weight than a wandering story. But it was written down a century after the fact, and it is best read as a well-attested tradition rather than a documented event.

What happened next is the strongest evidence that this was a working road rather than a curiosity.

Around 1680 — some eighty years after the arch was broken — the farmers of Biskupstungur took the matter into their own hands. Biskupasögur names the man who led them: Jón Jónsson smiður í Miklaholti, the smith at Miklaholt, with other leading men of the district. They rolled large boulders down into the narrows of the river to get a bridge across it again, and built the crossing up on top of them.

It did not hold. The winter floods on Brúará broke the work apart, and the repairs had to be done again and again.

People do not haul boulders into a river repeatedly, across generations, for a scenic spot. They do it for a road.

And some of that work is still in the river. Wedged between the walls of the fissure at its narrowest point, about thirty centimetres below the surface, sits a single large stone — a few hundred kilos, of the same grey basalt as the gorge walls, and somewhat water-worn. In July 1941 the water was so low that the stone stood clear of it, and Guðmundur was able to climb down onto it in the gorge and up the other side, crossing the river that way. By October 1946 there was more water and it was submerged, but still plainly visible.

He worked through four explanations for how a stone that size came to be there and settled on the last one: that it is the final remnant of the bridge the men of Biskupstungur built around 1680.

In 1907 Frederik VIII of Denmark came to Iceland with a retinue of around two hundred, including a large party of Danish parliamentarians, and the Icelandic state built him a road.

It ran from Reykjavík over Mosfellsheiði to Þingvellir, east through Laugardalur, across Brúará, and up into Haukadalur to Geysir and Gullfoss. It was dug and cleared by hand with shovels, picks and horse-carts, and it has been called Kóngsvegurinn — the King’s Road — ever since. The same journey left another bridge that people still stand on today, at Peningagjá in Þingvellir.

It crossed Brúará here, on a wooden bridge built for the occasion and set just below Brúarfoss.

What the road actually cost

The Icelandic national accounts for 1906 and 1907 were passed together. Road improvement costs across those two years came to 220,257 krónur, of which the King’s Road was the largest part, against total treasury expenditure of a little over 3.1 million — roughly fourteen percent of what the state spent in a year. Measured against the public purse it is probably the most expensive road ever built in Iceland.

The same figure is often repeated as a share of national output, with a modern equivalent of hundreds of billions of krónur attached. That is a different measure and it inflates the claim by an order of magnitude.

A light carriage was brought along for the king, with a driver named Guðmundur Hávarðarson, on the assumption that a monarch would not ride. He turned out to be a capable horseman and rode the whole way. The carriage travelled the entire route empty.

Who built it

The clearing of the road was supervised by Guðjón Helgason, road foreman and farmer at Laxnes in Mosfellssveit, who held charge of the Þingvallavegur and other roads from the year he moved to that farm until his death in 1919. His son was three years old when the family arrived there. He later took the farm’s name as his own and won the Nobel Prize in Literature as Halldór Laxness.

Further east the work was done by local men, and it is close enough to living memory that I have known some of their families. I spent a summer working at the farm at Múli as a boy, and the farmer there had a father who worked on building this road. So did a neighbour of ours near Strokkur. This is a small district, and that road went through the middle of it.

What the road was for

There is a case that it bought Iceland more than a fortnight of ceremony. Ólafur Örn Haraldsson, former warden of Þingvellir National Park and former president of Ferðafélag Íslands, has argued that the preparation for the visit, the journey itself and the relationships formed on it laid the foundation of trust that led to Icelandic sovereignty in 1918.

It was not a straight line — a draft union treaty was produced in 1908 and rejected by Icelandic voters the same year — and 1918 brought fullveldi, sovereignty within a shared monarchy, rather than the full independence that came with the republic in 1944. But two parliaments spent a fortnight together on horseback, and the road they rode crossed the river at this waterfall.

A man who drove a car over it

We know what that 1907 bridge was like because someone drove across it and wrote it down. In Lesbók Morgunblaðsins in 1963, Egill Hallgrímsson described crossing it in August 1927 on what he believed to be the first motor journey to Geysir. The track met the bridge at an angle, so the party had to lift the car bodily to line it up. The bridge ends rested on bedrock on both banks and it stood high above a roaring torrent. The timber was old and had never been meant for cars. One man drove it over alone while the others walked.

By 1948 that bridge was worn out and closed to motor traffic altogether.

A photograph taken from the bridge

Brúarfoss, around 1950, photographed by my father. Family archive.

My father photographed Brúarfoss around 1950, and for three-quarters of a century the picture sat in the family archive as nothing more than an old view of the falls. Then, in putting this archive together, I looked at where he was standing.

There is no foreground in the frame. The bottom edge of the photograph is white water — no bank, no grass, no rock a man could stand on. The camera sits a few metres above the river and almost exactly over the middle of the channel: both banks fall away symmetrically from the corners of the picture, which is not a view you can get from either shore. Whoever took this photograph was standing on something that spanned the river, a short way below the falls.

In 1950 there was exactly one such thing. The King’s Road bridge of 1907 stood just below Brúarfoss, its ends resting on bedrock on both banks. It had been closed to cars since 1948 — but a closed bridge still carries a man with a camera. Unless some structure below the falls has escaped every written account, my father took this picture from its deck, and in doing so recorded, without meaning to, where the bridge stood.

I state that as strong inference rather than settled fact, because that is this page’s rule. The geometry of the frame allows only one standing place I know of, and it can be tested: the sightline in the photograph can be walked out on the bank until the lip of the falls and the skyline align, and bedrock keeps the scars of bridge ends — bolt holes, cut seats — for a century. I intend to do exactly that, and this section will be updated with what the rock says, either way.

If the reading holds, the photograph is a small document of the road’s last years: the falls entirely alone, no path and no visitors, seen from the last working piece of a crossing that had carried people for a thousand years — about a decade before the new bridge downstream retired it for good.

When the 1907 bridge failed, something larger went with it, and Guðmundur named it plainly in 1948.

The old travellers’ route through here was called með hlíðum — along the slopes — and it was the shortest road between Laugardalur and Geysir. With the crossing gone, that road was abandoned. He wrote that in an age of general tourism it would surely have to be renewed before long, and made a proposal for how to bridge the gorge cheaply: it is only about two metres wide at the narrows, with good basalt bedrock on both sides, and Brúará’s steady spring-fed flow means there is no need to fear the floods and ice that make bridge-building expensive on most Icelandic rivers.

Nobody built it. The road never came back.

Brekka and Miðhús, the two farms in Hlíðar where I used to go as a boy to play with Jói and Hallur from school, sit on that road. Óskar and Hildur farmed at Brekka. What is a quiet lane now was the main way between two of the busiest places on the Golden Circle, and it stopped being one because a bridge fell down.

In the autumn of 1961 a new bridge over Brúará was completed and joined to newly laid road, four to five kilometres downstream of the falls.

That bridge is the reason the Golden Circle exists as a drive. Before it you could not simply go from Laugarvatn east through Laugardalur and Biskupstungur to Geysir by car. Afterwards you could.

For Brúarfoss the effect was the end of a thousand-year job. For as long as anyone had travelled through this district, people had passed the falls because that was where you crossed the river. After 1961 the traffic went over the new bridge, and there was no longer any reason to come here at all.

The place went quiet, and stayed quiet for roughly fifty years.

I grew up six or seven kilometres downstream, and in the 1980s we went up to the falls as children. It was the most beautiful place I knew and there was never anybody else there. That is still the Brúarfoss in my head, and it is not the one people photograph now.

How thoroughly it had been forgotten is easiest to show with one detail. Ungmennafélag Biskupstungna, the local youth association, organised a field trip to Brúarfoss — not for visitors, but for the farmers and families who actually lived in Biskupstungur, so they could go and see it and learn what it was. People living a few kilometres away had to be taken to the waterfall on their own river and told about it.

What eventually brought people back had nothing to do with getting across the river.

Around 2010, as visitors started coming to Iceland in numbers again, photographs of Brúarfoss began appearing online. Slowly at first, and then not slowly at all. Those images did what no road had done since 1961. What makes that remarkable is that there was no easy way in. You parked on Route 37 and you walked. The original path ran across private land and was never made for the numbers that came; it was worn out and littered until it was closed, and the route that replaced it ran around seven kilometres there and back, two or three hours on your feet. People did it anyway, in numbers, purely to look at the water.

In a thousand years of use, nobody had ever walked to Brúarfoss. They walked past it, on the way to somewhere else.

In April 2023 a car park was opened much closer to the falls, with a fee and a walk of about five minutes at the end. There is an irony in that whole sequence which applies to this article as much as to any other: Brúarfoss was damaged by being written about, and every piece that called it a hidden gem helped make sure it stopped being one.

So the waterfall never changed. What changed is what it was for. It spent a thousand years as a piece of the road network and about a decade as a photograph, and the people who arrive now are, without knowing it, queuing to stand in the middle of a road. The quiet place I walked to as a boy has a car park and coaches in it, and none of that has anything to do with why anyone came here for the first thousand years.

This is the part worth reading before you go.

People have drowned in Brúará, including visitors on the walk to the falls. The reasons are unremarkable, which is exactly the problem. The path runs close to the water for long stretches. The ground is often wet and the rock is slippery. The river is fast and cold, and someone who goes in has very little time before the cold takes their strength — and on this path there is usually nobody positioned to help.

None of that is a reason to stay away. It is a reason to treat the thing in front of you as a river before you treat it as a photograph. I grew up beside this water and I have never once been casual about it.

• Stay well back from the edge, particularly where the path narrows above the water.
• Wear boots with grip. This is not a walk for trainers, and in winter it is not a walk without spikes.
• Do not climb down towards the water for a better angle. The photograph everyone comes for is taken from the footbridge and the marked viewpoints.
• Do not enter the river at any point, in any season. The arch under the water is not a crossing and has not been one for four hundred years.
• Keep children close on the stretches beside the water.

Getting there

The falls are reached from Route 37 between Laugarvatn and Geysir. Since April 2023 there has been an official car park close to the falls, with a walk of about five minutes from it. Parking is paid through the Parka app, currently 750 ISK for a car or an SUV and more for larger vehicles. The track in to it is rough in places.

The older and longer trail is still open, and plenty of people still choose it: around two hours there and back, passing two smaller waterfalls, Hlauptungufoss and Miðfoss, on the way up. It is mostly flat but it can be very muddy after rain. Conditions change with the weather, and in winter both the access track and the path can be genuinely icy.

Why is Brúarfoss so blue? Because Brúará is spring-fed rather than glacial. The water runs clear instead of carrying rock flour, and clear water over dark volcanic rock, concentrated in a deep narrow rift, reads as that intense blue. It has nothing to do with Langjökull, despite what many descriptions say.

Is it Brúarfoss or Bruarfoss? Both refer to the same waterfall. Brúarfoss is the Icelandic spelling; Bruarfoss is what most English speakers write, because the accented ú is awkward to type. The older form of the name is Brúarárfoss.

Where does the name come from? From a natural stone arch that once crossed the river at the falls. The river was named after the crossing — Brúará, bridge-river — and the waterfall after the river.

Is the old stone bridge still there? A stone arch does still cross the river at the falls, submerged and easy to miss. Whether it is the famous one is disputed: local tradition holds that Skálholt’s men broke only the top off it in 1602, while the geologist Guðmundur Kjartansson argued the original stood slightly upstream. It is not a crossing and must not be treated as one.

Was the bridge at Brúarfoss built for the Danish king? Not the one you walk on; the footbridge is modern. But the King’s Road bridge of 1907 stood just below the falls, and the King’s Road ran past Brúarfoss. The royal party crossed the river here.

Was Jón Gerreksson drowned at Brúarfoss? The bishop was drowned in Brúará in 1433, and the story is often attached to the waterfall. The tradition places the killing downstream, near Skálholt, rather than at the falls.

How long is the walk? About five minutes each way from the official car park, which opened in April 2023. The older trail takes around two hours there and back and passes Hlauptungufoss and Miðfoss.

Is Brúarfoss safe to visit? On the marked path, with proper footwear, yes. People have drowned in this river, including on the walk, so stay back from the edge, do not climb down to the water, and do not go in.

Is there a fee? Yes. Parking is paid through the Parka app — currently 750 ISK for a car or SUV, more for larger vehicles.

Guðmundur Kjartansson, “Steinboginn á Brúará”, Náttúrufæðingurinn, 1. tölublað 1948, pp. 42–47. The surviving arch under the water, the stone wedged in the fissure, the spring-fed character of Brúará, the 1680 rebuilding, the road með hlíðum, and the state of the 1907 bridge.

Jón Halldórsson of Hítardalur, Biskupasögur (Sögufélag edition, p. 190). The breaking of the arch in 1602, the steward, Helga Jónsdóttir and Bishop Oddur; and Jón Jónsson smiður í Miklaholti and the rebuilding around 1680.

Landnámabók (Sturlubók), ch. 99, in Íslenzk fornrit I. Ketilbjörn’s claim to the whole of Biskupstunga and the line from Teitur to Bishop Ísleifur.

Egill Hallgrímsson, “Fyrsta bílferð að Geysi”, Lesbók Morgunblaðsins, 1st issue 1963, p. 4. The 1907 bridge as it stood in August 1927.

Icelandic national accounts (landsreikningur) for 1906 and 1907. Road improvement costs of 220,257 krónur against total treasury expenditure of a little over 3.1 million.

Ólafur Örn Haraldsson on the 1907 royal visit and its part in the road to Icelandic sovereignty in 1918.

Óskar at Brekka in Hlíðar, for the account of the arch as it is told in the district. The childhood memory of the falls before the crowds, the Ungmennafélag Biskupstungna field trip, and the families of the men who built the road through this district are local knowledge from the author.

A family photograph of Brúarfoss from around 1950, by the author’s father, taken from a position over the river below the falls. The reading of the camera position, and its identification with the 1907 King’s Road bridge, are the author’s — stated as inference pending verification on the ground.

The fissure is not really called Peningagjá. The coin tradition probably does not begin where the guidebooks say it begins. The wishing well was a signpost put up in the 1920s, not a folk tale. And the bridge everybody stands on was not built for tourists at all — it was built for a king, and then it spent decades being used as a working road, including by a hay truck in the summer of 1947 that had no business being anywhere near Þingvellir.

Most visitors reach Peningagjá about four minutes’ walk from the church at Þingvellir. They stop on the bridge, look down through the water at a scattering of coins on the bottom, take a photograph, and walk on. The fissure gets perhaps ninety seconds of a Golden Circle day.

That is a shame, because almost every detail in the standard account of this place is either incomplete or quietly wrong. What follows is what the documented sources actually say.

Peningagjá is not a separate fissure. It is a stretch of a larger one, and the naming runs three layers deep.

The parent feature is Flosagjá, one of the major water-filled rifts at Þingvellir, named after Flosi Þórðarson of Svínafell — the chieftain who led the burning of Njáll and his sons in Njáls saga. Opposite the assembly site the fissure splits along a long stretch, and the eastern branch of that split is Nikulásargjá. Between the two branches lies Spöngin, the narrow tongue of lava that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarians believed had held the original Lögberg.

Peningagjá — money fissure — is the name attached to the section of Nikulásargjá directly beneath the bridge. Many visitors, and a fair number of guides, know the place only by that nickname and have no idea it has a proper name at all.

It also gets confused with Silfra, constantly, including in tour listings. They are different fissures with different rules. Silfra lies further east, largely submerged in Þingvallavatn, reaching around 60 metres deep, and it is the site permitted for diving and snorkelling. Peningagjá is crossed by a road bridge, is looked at from above, and is not a swimming site. They share a water source and a geological origin. They are not interchangeable.

The fissure carries the name of Nikulás Magnússon, district magistrate of Rangárvallasýsla, born around 1700, who died at Þingvellir on 24 July 1742 during the annual assembly.

Most English-language pages compress this into a single clause — named after a magistrate who drowned here in 1742 — and move on. The Icelandic sources are a good deal more specific, and a good deal less settled.

The closest thing to a first-hand record comes from Sveinn Sölvason, who was sitting at the Alþingi that summer for the first time as deputy lawman for the north and west, and who later compiled Íslands árbók, an annal covering 1740 to 1781. His account describes the magistrate leaving his bed one night and wading east across the river Öxará. A boy went with him — old enough to follow, not old enough to stop him — and tried to keep watch, but was sent away. The boy ran back to Þingvellir in fear to raise help. By the time men came, the magistrate had vanished.

That is a materially different story from “a magistrate drowned in this fissure”. It is a night, a river crossing, a witness who was dismissed, and a search that came too late.

The folk-tale version, collected in Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri, says he threw himself in because he feared he would lose a case then pending against his reputation. Whether that was the reason or a story built afterwards to explain the death, it is the explanation that survived orally, and it is why the place-name stuck rather than fading.

This is the detail that almost never surfaces in English.

Some sources place the death in Nikulásargjá itself, which would be circular but consistent. Others place it in Flosagjá, the parent fissure. Espólín records that he made away with himself in Vatnsgjá and was found there dead — a different name again. And Nikulásargjá is itself recorded under an older variant, Nikulásarpyttur, Nikulás’s pit.

The honest position is that the fissure is named for Nikulás Magnússon, but the precise stretch of water in which he died is not established by the sources. Anyone standing on that bridge is standing at a memorial whose exact location is uncertain. That is a more interesting thing to be told than a false certainty.

The bridge across Nikulásargjá was laid in 1907, and it was not built for tourism. It was built because a king was coming.

Frederik VIII of Denmark visited Iceland in the summer of 1907 with a party of around two hundred, including Danish parliamentarians and foreign journalists. In preparation the state built a carriage road from Reykjavík to Þingvellir and onward east to Geysir, Gullfoss and Þjórsártún. It became known as Konungsvegur, the King’s Road.

The scale of it is easy to underestimate. The road cost the Icelandic treasury the equivalent of fourteen percent of a full year’s state expenditure. It was built up in sections with culverts, bridges and well-made cairns. The king’s party reached Þingvellir on the evening of 1 August after eight hours of travel, and the crowd lining Almannagjá called out for him as he rode down. Having built a carriage road at considerable expense, the state then watched the king decline the carriage. He preferred to ride.

The bridge over Nikulásargjá was part of that road. And the road did not go to Þingvellir. It went through Þingvellir, to Bruarfoss Waterfall and onward east, into the farming districts – and Geyser and Gullfoss waterfall area. That is the detail everything else in this article hangs on.

During resurfacing work on the approach west of the bridge, the asphalt was stripped back carefully — because at Þingvellir you can turn up archaeology anywhere — and stone edging appeared almost at once. First on the north side of the road, then more clearly on the south. Those are the built kerbs of the original Konungsvegur, still in place beneath the modern surface.

The modern road and the 1907 King’s Road are the same road. Nothing was abandoned and rebuilt elsewhere. The route persisted, and so did its use.

The standard story is that once the bridge was built, visitors began throwing small coins into the water below, and the stretch gradually acquired the nickname Peningagjá. That much is well supported, including by Þingvellir National Park’s own place-name register.

But there are two complications that are almost entirely absent from English-language coverage.

The first is older. The park’s place-name records trace the name to two possible events, not one. The second is an eighteenth-century case tried at Þingvellir concerning counterfeit currency — coins adulterated with a cheaper metal. According to the sources the offending coins were cut apart and scattered into the fissures at Þingvellir as part of the disposal. Which fissure received them, whether Peningagjá or Silfra or another, is not recorded. But it means the association between this landscape and discarded money may predate the tourist tradition by more than a century.

The second complication is that the wishing well is not folklore. It is signage. In the 1920s a sign reading “to the wishing well” was put up directing visitors to Peningagjá, and the story that you could make a wish there spread from that point. Þingvellir National Park states plainly that there is no folk tale attached to Peningagjá — that the coins in the freezing water are better read as a symbol of what the water itself is worth.

This is worth saying clearly, because a great deal of published travel writing presents the wishing tradition as ancient Icelandic custom. It is roughly a century old, and it started with a signpost written in English.

As for the claim that Frederik VIII threw the first coin from the new bridge: accounts say so, and it is repeated as established fact across a large number of travel sites. The park’s own wording attributes it to accounts rather than to record. Treat it as tradition.

This has changed, and a lot of published guidance has not caught up.

Coins are metal. Metal sitting in still, cold, extraordinarily pure water does not simply lie there looking picturesque. It corrodes, and heavy metals from decades of accumulated coins have been measured entering the water system at levels beyond what is acceptable.

Rangers have spent years clearing coins not only from Peningagjá but from Flosagjá, from the river Öxará, and — most uncomfortably — from Drekkingarhylur, the Drowning Pool, where women condemned under the moral statutes were executed by drowning between 1590 and 1749. Rangers have pointed out the obvious wrongness of treating an execution site as a wishing well. Drekkingarhylur is also deep, and hazardous to dive, which makes clearing it genuinely difficult. Coins recovered by rangers have historically been collected and given to charity rather than thrown away.

The practical position today is simple. Throwing coins into the fissures at Þingvellir is not something to do. Look at the ones already down there, understand what they cost the water, and keep your change.

The water in Peningagjá is not run-off and it is not river water. It begins as meltwater from Langjökull, roughly 50 kilometres to the north, and travels underground through porous post-glacial lava before surfacing in the fissure system at Þingvellir.

The park’s own figure for Silfra is around thirty years underground. The wider range cited in the literature is thirty to a hundred years. Either way, water surfacing in these fissures today fell as snow on the glacier before most of the people photographing it were born.

That journey is what produces the clarity. Decades of filtration through lava strip the water of suspended particles, giving visibility that in the adjacent fissures routinely exceeds 80 to 100 metres. The temperature holds at roughly 2 to 4 degrees all year, which is why the fissure neither freezes over in winter nor warms in summer.

Most of the water that forms Þingvallavatn arrives this way, from beneath the lava rather than across it. There is an old Icelandic saying for it: fertile is the water that runs under lava.

Þingvellir sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart, in one of very few places on earth where that boundary is visible on land rather than hidden under ocean.

The figure everybody quotes is about 2 centimetres a year. That figure is correct for full plate motion. It is not the rate at which Þingvellir itself is pulling apart, and it is emphatically not the rate at which any individual fissure widens.

Spreading in south Iceland is split between two parallel rift segments, the Western Volcanic Zone — which runs through Þingvellir — and the Eastern Volcanic Zone. Þingvellir does not get the whole 2 centimetres. GPS measurement across the Þingvellir graben has produced a spreading rate of roughly 6.7 millimetres a year. The graben is also subsiding rather than only widening: levelling profiles show continuous downward movement, and since the lava flowed the valley floor has dropped around 40 metres while the rifting has amounted to about 70. Þingvellir National Park’s own estimate for how fast individual fissures widen is one to five millimetres a year.

So the honest answer to how fast Peningagjá is getting wider is: slowly, at a rate measured in single millimetres, but continuously — and the movement is downward as well as outward.

It does not always move gently. In the summer of 2000 two severe earthquakes struck south Iceland with epicentres 40 to 50 kilometres from Þingvellir. Stones fell from the ravine walls. Water surged up out of the rifts. And the water in Flosagjá, normally glass-clear, was thrown into such turbidity that the coins on the bottom could not be seen.

The rift is not a museum exhibit. It is load-bearing geology that periodically releases.

I have a photograph, taken in 1947, of a loaded hay truck at Peningagjá. My father is driving the first car and is taking the photo.

The interesting question about that photograph is not what a truck is doing on the bridge. It is what hay is doing on the truck.

Icelandic farmers cut hay on their own land. That is what the home field was for. Hay was not hauled between districts, let alone between one end of the country and the other, because there was no reason to do it and no cheap way to do it. A truckload of hay crossing Þingvellir is not a picture of ordinary farm work. It is a picture of something having gone badly wrong.

What had gone wrong was the summer of 1947.

The weather record for that year is unambiguous. Through July the rain fell almost without pause across the south and west of Iceland, while the northeast and east had good haymaking weather. August repeated it — more rain in the south and west, very favourable conditions in the northeast. That is most of the haymaking season, and the south simply could not get a crop dry.

It was not the only thing pressing on the land that year. On 29 March 1947 Hekla erupted after more than a century of quiet, throwing a plume some 30 kilometres into the air, and it went on erupting for thirteen months, with heavy lava flow and repeated tephra fall over the farming districts of the south.

So farms across the south of Iceland went towards winter without enough hay to feed their animals, and hay had to be brought down from the north, where the summer had been kind.

Which brings in the third thing about 1947. Iceland’s foreign currency reserves had run out that year, and the country was deep into what Icelanders call the skömmtunarár, the rationing years — import restrictions and ration coupons on a long list of goods, at their most severe between 1947 and 1949. Fuel was not something you simply bought as much of as you liked. Marshall aid did not begin arriving until 1948, and the rationing eased only gradually after that.

Put those three things together and the photograph stops being a snapshot and becomes a document. A wet summer, an erupting volcano, and fuel under rationing — and trucks nonetheless driving the length of the country with hay on the back, over a bridge built forty years earlier for a Danish king, because the alternative was livestock starving.

The hay on that truck was going to the farm at Skálholt, in Biskupstungur.

My father drove the trip in his own truck. Also in the photograph is Húnbogi Hafliðason from Hjálmsstaðir in Laugardalur — the valley the road runs through between Þingvellir and Biskupstungur — presumably at the wheel of the second truck.

Húnbogi is worth a paragraph of his own. He was born on 27 November 1891, and Hjálmsstaðir was known across the district for verse; the household turned out so many rhymers that people spoke of the Hjálmsstaðir academy. He was a reciter of rímur, and said of himself that he had been born down into the age of them. He was also the kind of man who could turn his hand to anything.

In November 1966, a few weeks before his seventy-fifth birthday, Vísir sent a reporter to interview him. They found him at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Reykjavík, where he worked from eight in the morning until six at night handling crates of twenty-four bottles — thirty-six cases to a lift, a lift roughly every five minutes, at seventy-four years old. The paper described him as the industry of the whole nation compressed into one man. Asked what the greatest gift in life was, he said: courage.

Nineteen years before that interview, he was on the road over Þingvellir with a load of northern hay.

This is why the photograph matters more than anything else on this page. Peningagjá is presented to visitors as a curiosity — a pretty crack in the rock with coins at the bottom and a wishing-well story attached to it. In the summer of 1947 it was a bridge on the only sensible route east, being crossed by men hauling emergency winter feed the length of Iceland during a rationing year.

The coins in the water and the hay on the truck belong to the same bridge, forty years apart.

It is one of the easiest features in the park to reach — a short walk from Þingvallakirkja and the farmhouse, on the road past Spöngin. Nikulásargjá is the proper name; Peningagjá is the nickname for the stretch under the bridge. Do not throw coins. There is no swimming or diving here; that is Silfra, and it requires a permitted operator.

The clarity of the water reads best when the sun is not directly on the surface. Overcast conditions, or low angled light, will usually give you the bottom rather than a reflection of the sky.

And take the extra ten minutes to walk out onto Spöngin, between the two branches. Most visitors photograph the coins and turn back without realising they are standing beside what earlier generations believed was the original Lögberg.

What does Peningagjá mean? It translates as money fissure or money gorge — peningur meaning money or coin, gjá meaning fissure or rift. It is a nickname. The proper place-name is Nikulásargjá.

Why is it called Nikulásargjá? After Nikulás Magnússon, district magistrate of Rangárvallasýsla, who died at Þingvellir during the assembly on 24 July 1742. Contemporary accounts describe him leaving his bed at night, crossing the Öxará, and disappearing. The exact fissure in which he was found is recorded inconsistently across the sources.

When was the bridge over Peningagjá built? In 1907, as part of Konungsvegur, the King’s Road, built for the visit of King Frederik VIII of Denmark. The coin-throwing tradition dates from after the bridge was in place.

Can you still throw coins into Peningagjá? No. Coin-throwing is no longer permitted, and heavy metals from decades of accumulated coins have affected water quality. Rangers have been removing coins from Peningagjá and from other fissures at Þingvellir.

How deep is it? The Flosagjá system reaches depths of around 25 metres in places. The clarity of the water makes it look far shallower than it is, which is a common source of misjudgement in photographs.

Where does the water come from? Meltwater from Langjökull, around 50 kilometres north, which travels underground through porous lava for an estimated thirty to a hundred years before surfacing in the fissures at Þingvellir. That filtration is what produces the clarity, and it holds the water at roughly 2 to 4 degrees all year.

Is Peningagjá the same as Silfra? No. Silfra is a separate, deeper fissure to the east, largely submerged in Þingvallavatn, and it is the permitted diving and snorkelling site. Peningagjá is viewed from the bridge above.

Þjóðgarðurinn á Þingvöllum, örnefnaskrá — entries for Peningagjá and Nikulásargjá.

Þjóðgarðurinn á Þingvöllum — Þinghelgin; Tectonic Movements; Silfra.

Sveinn Sölvason, Íslands árbók, annal covering 1740–1781.

Jón Espólín, Íslands Árbækur í sögu-formi.

Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri, Viðburðasögur — “Nikulásargjá”.

“Heilir hildar til — heilir hildi frá”, interview with Húnbogi Hafliðason, Vísir, 7 November 1966, p. 7.

Veðurstofa Íslands, monthly weather summaries for 1947.

Sigurður Þórarinsson, “The eruption of Mt. Hekla 1947–1948”, Bulletin Volcanologique 10, 1950.

Islam, M. et al., “Continuous subsidence in the Thingvellir rift graben, Iceland”, Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 2016.

LaFemina, P. et al., on partitioned spreading rates across the Western and Eastern Volcanic Zones, 2005.

Contemporary press coverage of the 1907 royal visit and the building of Konungsvegur.

This is the single most important shift in mindset, and it changes everything.

Come to Iceland for Iceland — the waterfalls, the black beaches, the glaciers, the steam rising off the ground, the empty roads through landscapes that don’t look real. Enjoy that. Then treat the northern lights as a wonderful bonus on top, not the reason the trip succeeds or fails.

People who come only to see the aurora often go home disappointed, because they pinned an entire trip on something no one controls. People who come to experience Iceland, and stay ready for the lights, tend to go home happy either way — and they’re the ones who actually catch the aurora more often, because they’ve built their trip the right way.

So the goal is simple: enjoy the journey through Iceland, and shape that journey so the bonus becomes as likely as possible. That’s exactly what we try to do.

If you base your whole trip on day-tours out of Reykjavík, you’ll spend most of your time in and around the city. Those tours can be excellent — this isn’t a knock on them. But the trade-off is real: you end up seeing a fraction of the country, because you keep returning to the same base each night.

Being on a rental car and travelling around the country is a different kind of freedom. You see far more of Iceland by day, you stay in the countryside at night, and — crucially for the aurora — you can move. More on why that matters in a moment.

To be completely fair: staying in Reykjavík and taking evening aurora tours is a perfectly valid choice. It’s simpler, and you don’t drive. It’s a genuine option, and for some people it’s the right one. But if you want to both see more of Iceland and improve your aurora odds, self-driving gives you both. It’s a choice, and I want you to make it with open eyes.

Here’s the rhythm that matters.

During the day, you explore and enjoy. The aurora isn’t a daytime event, so daytime is simply for experiencing Iceland.

The opportunity opens in the evening, usually starting around 7–8pm and lasting until 4–5am, with midnight being the statistical peak based on the research. So the period that really matters is after you’ve arrived at your hotel for the night. That’s the window. And being ready in that window is what separates a good chance from a missed one.

This is exactly why, on our self-drive trips, we analyse the area around each hotel we use — and tell you where you could go that evening. Sometimes it’s worth driving a short distance to get out of light pollution. Sometimes there’s a beautiful spot nearby that makes a stunning backdrop for photos. Every hotel is different, so we look at each one through that lens and give you the local knowledge in advance.

People often think the aurora forecast is the whole story. It isn’t.

A geomagnetic storm can hit and the activity can be high — but you still have to actually see it, and clouds are usually the hardest problem. The lights can be dancing brilliantly above a thick cloud layer and you’ll see nothing.

This is the real reason being on a car matters so much. If clouds sit over your hotel, you want to be able to drive — even one or two hours — to find a clear patch of sky. A fixed base can’t do that. Mobility is the single biggest practical advantage you have against clouds.

So when you’re at your hotel in the evening: check the aurora forecast (activity level and cloud cover both). Talk to reception — they often know the local conditions and the best nearby spots. And ask about an aurora wake-up call. This one is genuinely important: many good hotels will wake you if the lights appear, so you can sleep without stress and not miss a sudden display. Because here’s the truth — it often happens unexpectedly, even when the forecast said otherwise. It’s nature; you can’t use science to predict it 100%.

That readiness — being on a car, watching the forecast, talking to locals, having a wake-up call — is what turns “we got unlucky” into “we were ready when it happened.”

Putting it all together: a self-drive trip lets you see far more of Iceland by day, puts you in the countryside (often darker skies) at night, and — most importantly — gives you the mobility to chase clear skies when clouds get in the way. Paired with knowing where to go around each hotel and being ready in the evening, that’s the strongest position we know how to put you in.

We can’t promise the aurora. But we can do everything within our power to improve your chances — and help you be ready when the moment comes.

Being mobile is your biggest advantage, but only if you do it safely. A few things I ask of everyone:

Be on a good 4×4. Weather and road conditions in Iceland can change fast, especially in winter. A capable vehicle isn’t a luxury here — it’s safety.

Always put safety first. If conditions are bad, the aurora is not worth a risk. It will come another night.

Tell reception your plans before you head out in the evening.

Keep the road-assistance number ready in case something happens and you end up waiting in the car for a while. Have warm clothing, water, and a charged phone.

And one thing locals will thank you for: never park in the middle of the road. People do this — they stop on the road and wander around in the dark to watch the lights — and it’s genuinely dangerous, because other drivers can’t see them. Always pull your car fully off the road into a proper spot, so you’re not a hazard to anyone while you wait for the aurora to dance.

Come for Iceland. Stay ready for the lights. Do it safely and respectfully. That’s the honest formula — and it’s the one we build every self-drive trip around.