Iceland’s Waterfalls – part 2

The day after we visited the waterfalls in yesterday’s post (Iceland’s Waterfalls – part 1), we had another spectacular day! After spending some quality time on a black sand beach in Vik (a post to come), we visited the Mighty Geysir – Strokkur and then came upon Gullfoss!

Gullfoss, the ‘Golden Falls’ is located in southwest Iceland and easily accessible during a day trip from Reykjavik. The waterfall is part of the Hvitá river, as it flows through a three-step staircase into a canyon; the steps are 11 m and 21 m, before a final step of 31 m into a crevice. The average amount of water flowing through the falls is 141 cubic meters (5000 cu-ft) per second, which made it very tempting for hydroelectric exploitation.

There were attempts to create a hydroelectric power plant here during various times in the 20th century, but each failed due to the prohibitive costs to potential investors. In the end, the rights to the waterfall were sold to the state of Iceland, and it is now protected.

Here’s a quick video of these immense waterfalls in my YouTube channel:

The images in this post are taken with a Canon EOS EOS R5 using a Canon RF24-105mm F4 L IS USM lens. First level processing of the images was done using Skylum’s Luminar AI software; touch up processing was done in Photoshop. Video was captured with an iPhone 13 Pro Max and processed with iMovie.