The Golden Circle is Iceland’s most popular day trip, for good reason.
You see the one and only original Geysir and having Gullfoss waterfall in front of you is worth a day trip on its own. Þingvellir is a National Park, nature reserve, Unesco World Heritage site, and split by the Mid-Atlantic Rift. We start the day in Þingvellir, where the Parliament of Iceland was founded in 930 AD. There, you get a view from “the edge of America” over the Mid-Atlantic continental divide. Continuing, we pass the geothermal heated Laugarvatn lake before arriving at the Great Geysir hot spring area, peppered with small and large boiling water springs. The most spectacular one, Strokkur, blasts wboiling water up to 30m skywards, up to 3 times in a minute. After some quality time at Geysir, a short drive takes us to Iceland’s most visited waterfall, Gullfoss, where glacier meltwater thunders in two stages into a 70m deep basalt canyon. In the afternoon, we head back again and traverse the South Iceland agricultural heartland on our way home to Reykjavik.