Twenty-five waterfalls step down the Fjarðará on its run to the sea, and Gufufoss is the last and the loudest of them. The name means steam falls, earned from the spray that hangs over the plunge pool when the air is still.
At roughly thirty metres the drop is modest by Icelandic measure, but it carries the meltwater of an entire heath through a notch in dark basalt. Seydisfjordur cruise excursions tours pass it by necessity rather than design: Route 93, the only road over the Fjarðarheiði pass at 620 metres, runs along its shoulder.
The village below was a Norwegian invention. Herring merchants settled here from 1848 and shipped timber houses across the sea in kit form, raising a shoreline of pastel gables found nowhere else in the country. The Bláa kirkjan, the blue wooden church at the head of the lagoon, dates from 1922. In 1906 the first telegraph cable to Iceland came ashore in this fjord, making a village of a few hundred people the nation's link to Europe. In February 1944 the British tanker El Grillo was bombed at anchor and sank where it still lies. On 15 December 2020 a mudslide came off the eastern slope and took a row of buildings with it. The village rebuilt.
Deep water and a sheltered approach keep the harbour busy. The Norræna ferry from Denmark ties up here through the season, and the same stretch of quay serves the ships — skemmtiferðaskip, in Icelandic — that make Seyðisfjörður one of East Iceland's landmark ports of call. Every Seyðisfjörður shore excursion that leaves the pier moves through the same geology: the hanging valley of Vestdalur above the town, the hexagonal basalt colonnades of Stuðlagil inland to the west, the cliff ledges where puffins raise a single chick through the short northern summer. Gufufoss sits at the near end of that sequence.
Access costs nothing. The waterfall is a roadside natural attraction on Route 93 with no gate, no booth and no closing hour — 0 ISK, every day of the week. The worth of seydisfjordur cruise excursions tickets lies elsewhere: in the vehicle that covers the distance, in the driver who knows which verge will hold a coach, in the guide who can name the rock. The water itself has been free since the road was cut over the heath.
5 hr
