The Almannagjá corridor
You walk in the split between continents.
Andreas Tille — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Holger Uwe Schmitt — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Holger Uwe Schmitt — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Holger Uwe Schmitt — CC BY-SA 4.0
The most famous day loop from Reykjavik: Þingvellir, then the Geysir thermal area, then Gullfoss waterfall — about 230 km, a comfortable day by car or organised tour.
Ninety minutes for the main corridor, the platform and the waterfall; half a day for the longer trails or a Silfra dive.
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Where a nation's history meets a planet's geology: Þingvellir is a rift valley forty kilometres from Reykjavik where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart two centimetres a year — so you walk between them in the Almannagjá corridor, a rock wall on your right and a sinking plain on your left: the split between two continents, seen with your own eyes. And here the Alþingi met in 930: the oldest parliament in the world still in existence, where free men gathered for two weeks each summer at the Law Rock to make laws and settle disputes — it ran for a thousand years, declared Iceland's conversion to Christianity in the year 1000, and saw the republic proclaimed in 1944. A UNESCO site for natural and cultural heritage at once. Paths are marked and the visitor centre explains, with the Öxarárfoss waterfall, a small church and the country's largest lake in the valley — and the Silfra fissure, flooded with clear meltwater, dived between the continents by permit.
You walk in the split between continents.
Where Iceland's laws were recited for a thousand years.
Diving in meltwater with a hundred metres of visibility.
Þingvellir, Iceland