Peningagjá: The Real History of Þingvellir's Money Fissure
Peningagjá: The Real History of Þingvellir's Money Fissure
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.
What You See Today
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 a Nickname Inside a Nickname
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 Man the Fissure Is Named For
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.
Nobody Actually Knows Which Fissure He Died In
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.
1907 — The Bridge Was Built for a King
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, and onward east, into the farming districts. That is the detail everything else in this article hangs on.
The King's Road Is Still Under the Asphalt
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.
How the Coin Tradition Really Started
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.
Why You Should Not Throw Coins Now
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.
Water That Fell as Snow Before You Were Born
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.
Two Plates, and a Number That Gets Misused
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.
Why Was There a Hay Truck at Peningagjá?
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.
Where That Load Was Going
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.
Visiting Peningagjá
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.
Common Questions
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.
Sources
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.
Strokkur: Why It Stopped Erupting - and the 1963 Drilling That Brought It Back
Why Strokkur Stopped Erupting — and How It Was Drilled Back to Life in 1963
Strokkur stopped erupting in the autumn of 1896, when earthquakes in South Iceland shifted the plumbing beneath the Haukadalur hot spring field. For sixty-seven years it did almost nothing. In July 1963 the Geysir Committee had a borehole drilled into it, 39.4 metres deep. The drill cut into a single water vein at the bottom of the hole and it erupted immediately. It has erupted ever since.
What You See Today
Strokkur goes off every few minutes — roughly nine times an hour, with something like seven minutes between eruptions on average. The crowd stands in a loose ring behind the rope, phones up, and waits. The water swells into a blue dome a second before it goes, which is the moment everyone is trying to catch and mostly misses.
It is the most reliable geyser in Iceland, and reliability is why it is on every itinerary in the country. What almost nobody standing there knows is that the reliability is recent, and that it was arranged.
Geysir and Strokkur Are Not the Same Hot Spring
This trips up most visitors, and a fair amount of published writing too.
Geysir — the original, the one that gave every geyser in every language its name — is dormant. It has been more or less quiet for decades. What you see there now is a large, still, steaming pool.
Strokkur is a separate hot spring a short walk away. Smaller, and the one actually erupting. Nearly every photograph captioned “Geysir erupting” is Strokkur.
The two are connected underground, and their histories run against each other: through the recorded past, when one has been active the other has tended to be quiet.
Before 1789 — Blocked on Purpose
The idea of intervening at Strokkur is not modern.
In 1708 Strokkur was deliberately blocked with turf and stones. The reason was agricultural: it was damaging the hayfield at Laug, the farm alongside the hot spring field. A hay meadow was worth more than a spouting hole in the ground.
Worth holding onto that, because the question people ask about 1963 — whether it is acceptable to interfere with a natural feature like this — was answered by the people who lived here 255 years earlier, in the other direction.
1789 — The Earthquake That Opened It
In 1789 a strong earthquake struck the region and Strokkur began erupting powerfully.
Four years later, in 1793, the naturalist Sveinn Pálsson recorded the geyser and its name. Strokkur means “churn” — the wooden butter churn, with its plunger driven up and down. Anyone who had made butter recognised the motion immediately.
The Nineteenth Century
The nineteenth-century record is a list of heights, and it reads like a decline with interruptions.
1804: around 45 metres, with Geysir reaching 65. 1809: 45 metres again, sustained for something like an hour and a half. 1810: 24 metres. 1815: over 60. By 1830 it was clearly weakening. In 1863 it managed 15 metres — but that eruption was induced, with gravel. By 1871 there was virtually no natural activity at all. In 1880 it was back to 25 or 28 metres.
That word induced is the part usually left out. For much of the nineteenth century Strokkur erupted mainly when people made it. Turf and gravel were thrown into the conduit to choke it and force a reaction, and visitors who had travelled a long way expected a show. The later soaping of Geysir was the same instinct with better chemistry.
So by the time anyone arrives at 1963, the site already has a two-hundred-year history of people reaching into it — first to stop it, then to start it.
1896 — The Earthquakes That Closed It
In the autumn of 1896 a sequence of earthquakes struck South Iceland, and the hot spring field rearranged itself.
Strokkur stopped almost completely. Geysir took over, erupting powerfully for the next two decades — which is precisely the period when Geysir’s international fame was established.
You will see 1907, 1920 and vague phrases like “around the turn of the century” given as the date Strokkur went quiet. Those are wrong. The event is the 1896 earthquake sequence, and the local record is clear about it.
Dormancy, 1896–1963
Sixty-seven years.
Over that time the water level in the conduit fell steadily. In 1931 the water stood about a metre below the surface, with a surface temperature of 80.5 degrees. In 1937 the conduit was measured at 11 metres. By the early 1960s the water was 1.6 metres down and the geyser itself was about 5.6 metres deep, with rubble and debris filling it down to around 12 metres, where solid rock began.
The clearest description of what it had become comes from Kristbergur Jónsson, who lived at Laug. He described a hole around 12 metres deep, narrowing as it went, with no standing water — only a small pool at the very bottom. Part of that account he had from his mother.
That is what was there in the summer of 1963. Not a geyser. A hole with rubble in it.
I met his son. Jón Kristbergsson lived in a turf house that is still standing near Strokkur, and my father took me there when I was eight or nine years old. My father was a tall man and had to bend to get through the doorway. We sat inside and drank black coffee. I was too young to ask him about Strokkur, which I have regretted since.
What I remember is him telling my father how strange he found it that the tourists coming to watch Strokkur had no idea the whole thing was partly man-made. He had been alive when it was not erupting. I do not remember his exact words — I was a boy, and it was a long time ago — but that was the sense of it, and it stayed with me.
July 1963 — The Drilling
In July 1963 the Geysir Committee had Strokkur drilled, with the stated aim of bringing it back.
The borehole went down 39.4 metres. A great deal of debris came up as the work went on. And at the very bottom the drill cut into a single water vein — one vein, right at the end of the hole — and Strokkur erupted immediately.
The record is thinner than it should be for something this consequential. It does not say whose rig it was. No photograph of the work has surfaced. If you know otherwise, I would like to hear from you.
I was born five years after they drilled it. I have never seen Strokkur do anything but erupt.
Since 1963
Strokkur has erupted continuously since that July, and it is the borehole that made it dependable rather than occasional.
Measurements since: a flow of about 2.5 litres per second in 1967, and roughly 2 litres per second measured for Iceland’s Nature Conservation Council on 17 September 1994, with water temperature at depth somewhere around 120 to 125 degrees.
The old habits took a while to die. Geysir was still being coaxed into performing after 1963, and the method was soap — poured in to lower the surface tension and set off an eruption on demand, usually for an audience.
My sport teacher at grammar school was one of the men who soaped Geysir. He went up at night, because it was not really permitted.
The site is now protected. Since 17 June 2020 it has been a protected natural monument, and interventions of the 1963 kind are no longer on the table.
So Is Strokkur Man-Made?
Partly. Honestly, yes, partly.
The heat is natural. The water is natural. The conduit is natural, and it erupted on its own for long stretches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the Strokkur you watch today — the one that goes off nine times an hour, reliably enough to build a tour schedule around — exists in that form because a rig drilled 39.4 metres into it in July 1963. Without that, it would be a small pool. Roughly what Geysir is now.
That is not a scandal, and it is not a secret. It is the continuation of something that had been going on at this site since at least 1708: people blocking it, choking it, throwing turf into it, soaping it, drilling it. The 1963 borehole is the most successful thing anyone has done to it, not the first.
What strikes me most about 1963 is that they simply did it. The public record does not show much in the way of study beforehand — whether the drill might damage the conduit, what it would do to the other hot springs around it, how the veins under the field connect. A committee decided, a rig came, and it worked.
Nobody would do that now. Geysir sits quiet a short walk away, and the reason nobody drills it is that the ground underneath is not well enough understood to know what a borehole would do to the rest of the field. That caution has been argued out in public, in the newspapers, over years. Strokkur got no such debate.
I am not sure the caution is wrong. But it is worth saying plainly that the same caution, applied in 1963, would have left Haukadalur with two silent pools and nothing to watch.
Sources
Ingólfur Guðnason, “Strokkur og hverasvæðið í Haukadal”, Litli-Bergþór, magazine of Ungmennafélag Biskupstungna.
Helgi Torfason, article on Strokkur in Eyjar í eldhafi (1995), festschrift for Jón Jónsson.
Helgi Torfason, “Geysir vakinn upp”, Náttúrufræðingurinn 53 (1–2), 1984, pp. 5–6.
Ísleifur Jónsson, “Hvers vegna sefur Geysir?”, Morgunblaðið, 22 July 1997, pp. 26–27.
Umhverfisstofnun, Stjórnunar- og verndaráætlun — Geysir 2022–2031.
How to actually improve your chances of seeing the northern lights in Iceland
First: come for Iceland, treat the lights as a bonus
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.
Why being on a rental car matters
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.
The day is for seeing. The evening is when the opportunity opens.
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.
Understanding the forecast — and the clouds
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.”
So why we believe self-drive is the best way
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.
Doing it safely (please read this part)
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.
