Attractions Near Langjokull Glacier

Almost nobody drives two hours into the Icelandic highlands for one hour on a glacier and nothing else, and almost no tour asks them to. The places below are where the rest of the day goes, and most of them are already inside one of the fares. A Langjokull tour is the shortest route to several at once.

Gullfoss

The waterfall the southern approach is named for, where the Hvítá drops in two stages into a canyon. Its water comes off the southern end of Langjökull, which makes the pairing of a waterfall and an ice cap on one itinerary a geographic fact rather than a marketing one.

The upper car park is free, has a café, and is the meeting point for four of the tours listed here. If you are driving the route yourself, it is the single most efficient place to join a glacier tour: park once, ride the ice, come back to your own car.

Geysir and Strokkur

Ten minutes south of Gullfoss, and the reason the word "geyser" exists in English. The original Geysir itself now erupts rarely. The one that performs is Strokkur, which goes up every few minutes, to a height that surprises people who have only watched it on a screen. Entry to the field is free and it takes about forty-five minutes to walk.

Þingvellir

A rift valley where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart, and the site of Iceland's assembly from the tenth century. It is the first stop on most of the Golden Circle days here, and the one that most rewards a guide. What you are looking at is a landscape whose significance is not visible in it.

There is no admission charge to the park itself, though a service fee is charged for parking near the busier spots.

Húsafell

Not a town but a settlement: a hotel, holiday houses, a campsite, a bistro, a petrol station and geothermal baths. It is also the check-in for the ice tunnel, and the last fuel before the mountain road, which is worth knowing if you are driving.

Anyone doing the western approach is at Húsafell twice in a day. It is the one place on either route where you can have a proper meal before or after the ice.

Hraunfossar and Barnafoss

Ten minutes from Húsafell, and unusual enough to be worth a stop even after a glacier. A kilometre of small waterfalls seeps straight out of the face of a lava field into the river below, with no stream feeding them from above. Barnafoss, immediately upstream, is the opposite: a narrow, fast chute through carved rock.

Deildartunguhver

The highest-flow hot spring in Europe, west of Húsafell in Reykholtsdalur, producing something like 180 litres of boiling water a second. It supplies the district heating for towns fifty kilometres away, and it appears on the itinerary of the western private jeep day.

The Secret Lagoon

At Flúðir, south of the glacier, and the oldest swimming pool in Iceland. One tour here pairs it with the snowmobile hour, which is a gentler end to a cold day than a coach back into town. A towel is in that fare; a swimsuit is not.

Which of these your tour already covers

The table below maps each place to the tours here whose own itineraries include it, so you can see what you would be paying twice for.