Goðafoss: the waterfall of the gods
Thirty minutes from Akureyri, two banks and two car parks, and a name from the year Iceland changed religion. Which side to walk and which tours stop.
The short version
- Goðafoss is 50 km east of Akureyri on Route 1 — about 35 minutes, and free.
- Two car parks, one on each bank. The east side is quieter and gives the head-on view.
- Twelve metres high and thirty wide. It is about shape, not scale.
- Half-day tours from Akureyri start around €58; Mývatn combinations run €127 to €166.
Goðafoss is the best short stop in north Iceland: half an hour from Akureyri, free, and close enough to Route 1 that you can be out of the car and looking at it in three minutes. If you are driving the north at all, you will pass it. Stop.
It is not a big waterfall by Icelandic standards — twelve metres down and about thirty across. What it has is shape. The Skjálfandafljót river spreads into a broad curve and drops in a horseshoe over a lava ledge, split by rock into several falls, and the water is grey-blue with glacial silt off Vatnajökull.
The name
Goðafoss means waterfall of the gods, and the story attached to it is this. In the year 1000 the Alþingi at Þingvellir accepted Christianity, and Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði — the lawspeaker who made the ruling after a day and a night under a cloak — rode home north and threw his carvings of the old gods into this waterfall.
Worth knowing: the story appears in Kristni saga, written some two hundred years later, and there is no contemporary account of it. Icelanders tell it anyway, and the honest version is that it is a good story about a real decision rather than a documented event. Þorgeir’s farm at Ljósavatn is a few minutes down the road, which is at least consistent.
Which side to walk
There are two car parks, one on each bank, and they are not the same experience.
The west bank is the one with the petrol station and café, signposted first when driving from Akureyri. Paths are paved, it is a two-minute walk, and every coach stops here. You get the fall side-on and close.
The east bank takes a couple of minutes more to reach — cross the bridge and turn in — and gives you the head-on view of the whole horseshoe, which is the one in every photograph. It is markedly quieter. In summer, when the west side is three coaches deep, you can be almost alone on the east.
If you have twenty minutes, take the east. If you have forty, do both and use the bridge.
A word on footing: the rock is worn smooth where people walk to the edge, and there are no railings on much of it. In freezing spray in winter that surface is genuinely dangerous. There is no safety railing between you and the drop because Iceland largely does not do that, which is a freedom and a responsibility at the same time.
Getting there without a car
Half-day trips from Akureyri are cheap and short. Imagine Iceland Travel’s Goðafoss Waterfall Day Tour from Akureyri is two hours from €58 — the least you can spend to see it. BusTravel’s Goðafoss Waterfall & Fjord Viewpoint is three hours from €101 and adds the Eyjafjörður viewpoint on the way.
The Traveling Viking’s half-day combo with Laufás and the Christmas House is four hours from €146; Laufás is a turf farm complex and much better than it sounds.
Most people see Goðafoss on the way to Mývatn rather than for its own sake, and those are the better-value days out. Arctic Adventures’ Mývatn, Goðafoss & Grjótagjá half day is six hours from €127. BusTravel’s Mývatn, waterfall, hot springs & volcanoes is six hours from €159, and Imagine Iceland’s Lake Mývatn and Goðafoss day tour is eight hours from €166.
When to go
Any month. It does not freeze over, the road to it is main-road Route 1 and kept open, and it is floodlit in the dark months, which is unusual in Iceland and rather good.
Summer gives you the volume — the glacial melt peaks in July — and also the coaches. Early morning or after seven in the evening in June and July you will have it close to yourself, and the low northern light on the water at those hours is the reason to bother.
Our honest take
Free, thirty-five minutes from town, and it takes twenty of yours. There is no argument against stopping.
Do not book a tour that exists only to take you here unless you have no car and a spare morning — at €58 the short trip from Akureyri is fair, but Goðafoss belongs on the way to somewhere. Put it on a Mývatn day at €127 and you have the waterfall, the lake, the pseudo-craters and the steam vents in one run east.
And cross the bridge. The east bank is the whole point and half the visitors never see it.
