Iceland · Reykjanes
On the route
- Time needed
- 30–60 min
- Price
- Price not published — No charge to walk the viewing platforms; no official page stating whether the Gunnuhver car park charges could be read on 2026-11-01. The Reykjanesviti car park 1 km away charges 1,000 ISK per car for up to four hours (parka.is, read 2026-11-01).
- Season
- Year-round; safetravel.is posts Reykjanes eruption notices, so read it before driving.
- Access
- Paved and gravel roads from Keflavík via Hafnir or from Grindavík; a car park beside the field, then boardwalks and two viewing ramps over the steaming ground.
- Checked
- not yet confirmed on an official source
63.819, -22.684 · Iceland
Gunnuhver
Photograph: Steam rolling across the red and ochre clay at Gunnuhver, with the boardwalk and a few visitors on the right — Jakub Hałun / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Gunnuhver is the steaming mud-pool field at the south-western tip of the Reykjanes peninsula, a kilometre from the Reykjanesviti lighthouse and about half an hour by road from Keflavík airport. Visit Reykjanes, read on 1 November 2026, describes Iceland's largest mud pool here, about 20 metres across and boiling hard, and two ramps for visitors: one beside Gunnuhver itself, where you look down into the spring, and one on Kísilhóll, a silica hill with a view over the whole group. The same page says the steaming increased sharply after the nearby power station began drawing on the reservoir in 2006, and names the field after a ghost said to have been trapped in the spring about 400 years ago.
On a route plan it is an airport-day stop: 27 km and about 30 minutes from the terminal by OSRM on OpenStreetMap, 68 km and about 65 minutes from Reykjavík. The nearest coffee is at the Reykjanesviti visitor centre by the lighthouse, which Visit Reykjanes gives as open 10:00 to 17:00 daily in summer; fuel is in Keflavík or Grindavík.
Safety, from safetravel.is on 1 November 2026: there is no active eruption on the peninsula, Grindavík is open, though crevasses can be expected there and the area is still considered hazardous, and visitors are told to stay on marked pathways. At Gunnuhver the ground off the boardwalks is boiling clay; stay on them.
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What you can do from Gunnuhver
- Fagradalsfjall eruption-site hike
Marked trails from car park P1 to the 2021–2023 lava fields at Fagradalsfjall and Litli-Hrútur: 4–5 hours for Path A, open with no eruption under way; parking 1,000 ISK.
hike · Iceland4.5–6.5 h · Low costadds 7 h 40 to a day - Reykjanesviti lighthouse and Gunnuhver boardwalks
An hour at the tip of Reykjanes: Iceland's oldest lighthouse site, sea cliffs and the steaming Gunnuhver mud pools on boardwalks; 30 minutes from Keflavík airport.
hike · Iceland45–90 min · Low costadds 3 h 30 to a day
