Things to Do Near the Blue Lagoon, Iceland: 7 Stops

Reykjanes is the peninsula almost every visitor to Iceland lands on and almost nobody looks at. It holds the airport, the road to the city and the Blue Lagoon, and most itineraries treat all three as things to pass through. That is a waste of a landscape where the mid-Atlantic ridge comes ashore — but it comes with one enormous caveat, so read that first.

Before anything else: check what is open

The peninsula has been volcanically active in recent years, and access to individual roads and sites there has changed at short notice more than once. Nothing below should be treated as guaranteed to be open on your date. Check current road and site status before you set out, follow closures and signage without improvising around them, and build your day so that losing one stop costs you nothing. With a hire car this is straightforward; without one, a guided visit that adjusts its own route is the more sensible way to see any of it.

The seven, roughly west to east

• Gunnuhver — a wide field of steam vents and boiling mud where the ground hisses on both sides of a boardwalk. The most viscerally geothermal thing on the peninsula, and it smells like it.
• Reykjanesviti and the Valahnúkamöl cliffs — Iceland’s oldest lighthouse on a rise above black sea cliffs and stacks, with the North Atlantic doing what it does. Windy in a way that is genuinely difficult to overstate.
• The Bridge Between Continents — a small footbridge across a sand-filled fissure between the North American and Eurasian plates. Faintly silly as an attraction, and a five-minute stop that makes the geology legible in a way no sign does.
• Brimketill — a lava rock pool on the shoreline where the swell breaks over the rim, watched from a viewing platform. Best in rough weather, from behind the railing, never from the rocks.
• Seltún at Krýsuvík — orange, yellow and grey sulphur ground with steaming pools, boardwalked and easy to walk. The colour is unlike anything else within an hour of Reykjavík.
• Kleifarvatn — a deep, dark lake pinched between lava slopes, with a black-sand shore and almost nobody on it. The place on this list most people end up staying longest at.
• Garðskagi, at the northwest tip — two lighthouses, a broad horizon and one of the better spots on the peninsula for seabirds and for watching weather arrive from a long way off.

How to fit them around a lagoon booking

Sequence matters more than distance here. Do the driving and the walking first and the water last, never the other way round: coming out of a geothermal spa warm, soft and slightly stupefied is not the state in which anyone wants to go and stand on a clifftop in a gale. Two or three stops before an afternoon slot is a comfortable, unhurried half-day. Five is a route march. And if you are heading for a flight afterwards, count the stops as time spent, not time saved — the peninsula’s distances are short but its weather is not always cooperative. For route order, parking, walk times and the car you need, use the Reykjanes self-drive guide.

Everything on Reykjanes is fifteen minutes from everything else. The wind is what turns a short list into a long afternoon.

Why this stretch of road is worth the detour

Reykjanes gets skipped because it fails the postcard test: no glacier tongues, no thundering waterfalls, nothing that photographs like the images that sold you the trip. What it has instead is the mechanism. This is where the mid-Atlantic ridge runs onto land, which is the reason Iceland exists at all, and on this peninsula the process is visible at close range without a guide having to explain it — plates pulling apart under a footbridge, groundwater boiling out of the ground at Gunnuhver, the spa itself running on the same heat. Anyone who spends a week photographing the results across the south and east and never looks at the machinery on the way to the airport has seen the country slightly out of order.

If your Reykjanes time is limited to the airport road, our guide to the Keflavík to Reykjavík journey covers the transfer options, and the stops above slot into that drive rather than competing with it.