THE STORY
Contents
- Gullfoss, Iceland: The Footpath Dug for a King, the Lost Lawsuit, and the Barn Called London
- How a River Eats Its Own Foundation, and Why November Turns the Gold to Concrete
- Gýgur’s Gold Chest, the Shepherd Who Waded the Lip, and the 38-Pound Salmon Wall
- The 1907 Pickaxe Path, the Lawsuit Sigríður Lost, and the State’s Quarter-Flow Trickle
- London in the Homefield, Burned Vellum in the Cowshed, and Every Third Salmon
- Quick Facts: Gullfoss Waterfall & Brattholt History
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- Related Iceland Explained Episodes
Gullfoss, Iceland: The Footpath Dug for a King, the Lost Lawsuit, and the Barn Called London
Walk down the lower footpath at Gullfoss on a windy afternoon, and the spray reaches your coat long before you reach the rock ledge. Up at the visitor center on the rim of Gullfossgljúfur, thousands of travelers step off Golden Circle coaches, snap a photograph of white water vanishing sideways into a seventy-meter trench in the earth, and climb back up for a bowl of lamb soup. The story most people carry back to the bus fits neatly inside a twenty-minute stop: an untouched subarctic monument, rescued in a triumphant courtroom victory by a farmer's daughter who walked barefoot to Reykjavík.
Down on the wet dolerite sill between the cascades, where two people standing shoulder to shoulder have to give up trying to finish a sentence against the bass rumble of the gorge, both halves of that tourist story fall apart. The rock lip you are standing beside is not a permanent monument; it is a retreating demolition zone that eats its own gravel foundation from underneath by twenty-five centimeters a year. And the woman on the bronze plaque, Sigríður Tómasdóttir, did not win her court case. What kept the river Hvítá pouring over these steps was a pickaxe wielded for a Danish king in 1907, an unpaid rent invoice in 1928, Sigríður and Einar living in a cowshed after a fire in 1952, and Einar, who finally locked out the state's own hydro-engineers in 1979.
How a River Eats Its Own Foundation: and Why November Turns the Gold to Concrete
To understand what the water is doing under your boots, you have to trace the Hvítá ("The White River") forty kilometers north into the central highlands, where it drains the proglacial lagoon of Hvítárvatn at the eastern edge of Langjökull, Iceland's second-largest ice cap. Joined by the glacial torrent Jökulfall from the rhyolite peaks of Kerlingarfjöll, the river carries a continuous load of microscopic rock flour (jökulmjöl) ground from the volcanic bedrock beneath the moving ice.
At Gullfoss, an average of 109 cubic meters of that sediment-heavy water passes over the lip every second: roughly the volume of a five-meter cube arriving once a second, day and night, swelling to 130 or 141 cubic meters per second during high summer melt. Under a low July sun, suspended plagioclase and pyroxene silt scatters warm amber wavelengths through the rising mist dome and bends double rainbows across the gorge, giving the "Golden Falls" their name. Come back under flat November cloud cover and the optical trick disappears: the sediment is still there, and the river looks like wet grey concrete pouring into a cellar. During extreme winter rain-on-snow thaws and glacial spates, like the historic floods of 1930 and 1948, when discharge surged toward 2,000 cubic meters per second, the brown torrent fills the entire seventy-meter-deep canyon to the brim, erasing both steps of the waterfall into a single violent rapid.
Even at ordinary flows, the river is systematically dismantling the cliff. Over the last several hundred thousand years, alternating glacial and interglacial periods built a geological sandwich across this valley. During warm interglacial intervals, shield volcanoes poured thick sheets of basaltic lava across the plain, which cooled slowly into hard, columnar-jointed dolerite (grágrýti). Between those hard igneous armor plates lies an interglacial sedimentary sequence of mudstone, conglomerate, and gravel with loose, unbonded lenses; the visible gravel layer measures eight meters at the falls and forty meters at the front of the canyon.
After dropping eleven meters over the broad three-stepped upper staircase, split near its center by a frost-wedged basalt crag known locally as the Lady in Gullfoss, the river pivots ninety degrees into a narrow fault slot and plunges another twenty-one meters. Rather than wearing down the hard dolerite caprock from on top, the turbulent boil at the base of each drop scours the loose gravel lenses out from underneath the stone shelf. As the gravel washes away, an unsupported dolerite overhang grows until the rock shears along its vertical cooling fractures and crashes into the abyss. Whether the 2.5-kilometer gorge of Gullfossgljúfur was jump-started by a late-Ice-Age glacial outburst flood (jökulhlaup) or cut steadily over ten thousand years of Holocene erosion, the explanation favored by the Environment Agency of Iceland, the edge that looks fixed in your viewfinder is retreating upstream toward Langjökull by roughly twenty-five centimeters a year.
Gýgur’s Gold Chest, the Shepherd Who Waded the Lip, and the 38-Pound Salmon Wall
That thirty-two-meter vertical double drop slices the river's biology and folklore into two separate worlds. Downstream from the canyon, past the rock narrows of Brúarhlöð and the confluences at Brúará and Iða, the nutrient-clouded Hvítá is one of Europe's great highways for giant multi-sea-winter Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar). In June 1946, an angler at Iða landed a female salmon weighing 38.5 pounds (115 centimeters long), followed in September 1952 by a 37.5-pound fish at the mouth of the Brúará. Every one of those ocean-run giants hits a dead end at the boiling cauldron of Gullfoss, leaving the white water at the lip to compact Harlequin ducks (straumönd) that arrive from the North Atlantic surf each spring and use their stubby wings to fly underwater against the current, prying blackfly larvae off the submerged dolerite ledges.
For the farm households living along the canyon rim, the impassable cataract became a stage for two opposite human impulses: spiteful hoarding and reckless courtship. In the late eighteenth century, physician and naturalist Sveinn Pálsson recorded the local origin tale of the waterfall's name in his Ferðabók. A wealthy farmer named Gýgur lived a short distance downriver at Gýgjarhóll. Owned by his own chest of gold and unable to bear the thought that anyone else might enjoy his fortune after he died, the old miser dragged the chest to the brink and hurled it into the glacial churn.
A seventeenth-century parish story preserved in Jón R. Hjálmarsson's Þjóðsögur við þjóðveginn placed two young shepherds on opposite walls of the gorge: Þórður Guðbrandsson (born 1661) tending ewes from Brattholt on the west bank, and Guðrún Þóroddsdóttir (born 1676) watching her flock from Hamarsholt on the east bank, downriver from the turf ruins of Hvítárhamrar where Hekla ash-falls and wind erosion had stripped seven highland farms to bare gravel. Shouting across the roar of the water, Guðrún told Þórður she would marry him if he crossed the river to her side. Þórður walked upstream and stepped straight into the opaque, freezing glacial current directly above the upper staircase of Gullfoss, feeling with his boots across unseen dolerite ledges and deep potholes where a single misstep meant going over the eleven-meter brink. He reached the eastern bank alive, and parish registers confirm that the two married in 1690 and farmed together for decades at Fjall in Skeiðar.
The 1907 Pickaxe Path, the Lawsuit Sigríður Lost, and the State’s Quarter-Flow Trickle
Two and a half kilometers downstream on the western bank stands the farmstead of Brattholt, where the modern battle for Gullfoss was fought. In the summer of 1907, King Frederik VIII of Denmark sailed to Iceland with a mounted retinue of two hundred men. To carry the monarch inland to Geysir and Gullfoss, the Icelandic parliament made a substantial public investment in cutting the Kóngsvegur, the King's Road, across the southern plains with picks, shovels, and horse carts.
Yet when the royal road crews reached the upper moorland above Gullfoss, where sweet-scented holy grass (reygresi) and woolly willow cling to the turf, they stopped at the cliff edge. The final footpath down the steep scree to the lower ledge was dug with heavy iron picks and shovels by thirty-six-year-old Sigríður Tómasdóttir and her sisters from Brattholt, who then guided the earliest travelers down to the water. Sigríður never attended a day of formal school, yet she read voraciously, drew, and embroidered delicate floral and animal pictures between herding sheep in the hills and keeping the waterfall trail passable.
That same year, an English speculator knocked on the door at Brattholt offering a sum equal to fifty times the fire-insurance valuation of the farmhouse to purchase half-owner Tómas Tómasson's share of the falls. Tómas gave the answer carved into local memory: "Ég sel ekki vin minn": "I do not sell my friend."
His refusal did not end the matter. Through legal loopholes and Icelandic middlemen led by Sturla Jónsson, a 150-year lease on the water rights was secured and transferred to foreign hydroelectric developers who planned to dam the gorge. Sigríður launched a six-year campaign to annul the contracts, traveling the 120 kilometers between Brattholt and Reykjavík repeatedly in all seasons across mountain tracks and unbridged rivers to hire attorney Sveinn Björnsson, who would later become Iceland's first president.
The popular legend compresses those years into a single barefoot walk that triumphed in court. The archival record is much tougher. Sigríður lost the lawsuit. The court upheld Sturla Jónsson's lease, and when she persuaded her father to refuse the annual rent money, the payments were legally tendered anyway so the farm could not break the contract. Only when the law failed her did Sigríður issue her famous threat: on the day crews began building a dam, she would throw herself into Gullfoss. What finally killed the foreign power project in 1928 (formally canceled in the register in 1934) was an unpaid bill: unable to raise construction capital, the developers defaulted on the annual rent.
Even then, Gullfoss was not safe. In 1939, Sigríður sold Brattholt to Einar Guðmundsson (born 1904 and raised on the farm), who sold the waterfall to the Icelandic state in 1945. Sigríður distrusted the government's intentions so deeply that she petitioned in vain for legal confirmation that the falls had been excluded from the farm deed. She had every reason to worry: from the 1950s right up to 1977, state hydro-engineers drafted official schemes to harness the Hvítá for 2,444 gigawatt-hours of electricity a year by diverting three-quarters of the river into subterranean turbines and leaving a one-quarter cosmetic trickle running over Gullfoss during summer tourist hours. Only when Einar Guðmundsson donated the adjoining Brattholt riverbanks to the Nature Conservation Council in the 1970s, on the explicit condition that the land be fenced and used solely for nature conservation, was the 164-hectare Gullfoss Nature Reserve finally signed into law on March 9, 1979.
London in the Homefield, Burned Vellum in the Cowshed, and Every Third Salmon
Walk back toward Brattholt from the gorge, and you discover what kept that household anchored to the riverbank when both foreign syndicates and state engineers tried to buy them out. Since the first half of the nineteenth century, under farmer Guðni Runólfsson, the turf sheep sheds and hay outbuildings scattered across the Brattholt homefield carried official registered names borrowed from European capitals: Lundún (London) up on the eastern rise, París beside the hollow of Parísarleynir, Rómaborg (Rome) on the western flat, and Uppsalir (Uppsala) against the northern ridge. In the dead of January, a farmhand buckling on his coat to carry hay through a blizzard could tell the kitchen he was stepping out to London or Paris.
In the autumn of 1952, just after the highland sheep round-up, a fire burned the Brattholt farmhouse to the ground. Sigríður and Einar lost all their household goods, including, in local memory, Einar's uncatalogued collection of old vellum manuscripts (skinnbækur). Sigríður was eighty-one years old. Rather than move into a town apartment, she and Einar partitioned off a corner of the farm cowshed (fjós) and lived next to the cattle for two winters until a new farmhouse was finished in 1954. Meanwhile, down on the Brattholt salmon beats where lawyers had fought over 150-year paper leases, a local writer who fished the river with his father recalled how neighbors settled their fishing rent with Einar: a handshake at the start of the season, zero paperwork, and every third salmon carried up the hill to the farmhouse door.
Down at the lower ledge of Gullfoss in winter, when the mist freezes across Sigríður's 1907 path and builds groaning blue-white ice cornices over the seventy-meter walls, where stepping past the seasonal chain gate in smooth city soles risks sliding straight into the freezing, silt-blind churn that claimed a twenty-two-year-old man in July 2017, the waterfall refuses every postcard cliché. Beneath the roar that swallows your voice, the current is still washing loose gravel out from under the dolerite, retreating twenty-five centimeters a year past the sheltered birch oasis of Pjaxi and the outbuilding called London, while the path hacked by three farm sisters remains wet with spray.
A STORY. NOT A GUIDE.
ICELAND. TOLD.
Quick Facts: Gullfoss Waterfall & Brattholt History
| Feature / Attribute | Verified Field Detail |
|---|---|
| Location & Coordinates | Gullfoss Nature Reserve, Bláskógabyggð, South Iceland (64.3261, -20.1211); ~116 km northeast of Reykjavík at the apex of the Golden Circle. |
| Scale & Discharge | 32-meter (105 ft) double drop (11 m upper three-step staircase + 21 m lower plunge into a 20 m wide, 70 m deep, 2.5 km long canyon); average flow 109 m³/s (130–141 m³/s in summer; 2,000 m³/s in the 1930 and 1948 floods). |
| Geological Mechanism | Hard interglacial dolerite (grágrýti) resting over an interglacial sequence of mudstone, conglomerate, and gravel with loose lenses; the visible gravel layer is 8 m thick at the falls and 40 m at the front of the canyon; basal sapping undermines the caprock, retreating the falls by ~25 cm/year. |
| The 1907–1928 Struggle | 1907: Tómas Tómasson refuses an English buyer ("I do not sell my friend"); Sigríður Tómasdóttir and her sisters dig the first footpath for King Frederik VIII. 1920s: Sigríður and lawyer Sveinn Björnsson lose their lawsuit against leaseholder Sturla Jónsson. 1928: Lease voided for non-payment of rent. |
| State Plans & 1979 Reserve | Purchased by the state in 1945; state hydro-engineers drafted plans through 1977 to divert 75% of the river (2,444 GWh/yr) and leave a 25% summer trickle, until Einar Guðmundsson donated Brattholt land to establish the March 9, 1979 Nature Reserve. |
| Primary Field Hazard | Atomized glacial spray freezes into black glaze ice (svell) on the lower dolerite ledge and 1907 path from autumn through spring (bring steel microspikes / broddar); never cross chain barriers above the lethal, silt-opaque current. |
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Did Sigríður Tómasdóttir win her court case to save Gullfoss from a hydroelectric dam?
No. Although Sigríður walked and rode repeatedly between Brattholt and Reykjavík to fund a six-year legal battle led by lawyer Sveinn Björnsson (later Iceland's first president), the court ruled against the Brattholt family and upheld speculator Sturla Jónsson's 150-year lease. What saved Gullfoss in 1928 was the foreign developers' failure to pay the annual rent invoice, which voided the contract.
How does Gullfoss erode its canyon, and how fast is it retreating?
Gullfoss sits on a Pleistocene geological sandwich of hard interglacial dolerite (grágrýti) resting atop an interglacial sedimentary sequence of conglomerate, mudstone, and gravel containing loose, unbonded lenses. Rather than wearing down the hard dolerite from above, the turbulent current washes out the loose gravel underneath until the unsupported rock overhang snaps off into the gorge, causing the waterfall to retreat upstream by roughly 25 centimeters per year.
Who built the footpath down to the lower viewpoint at Gullfoss?
In the summer of 1907, when the Icelandic parliament funded the building of the Kóngsvegur (King's Road) for King Frederik VIII of Denmark and stopped at the canyon rim, Sigríður Tómasdóttir and her sisters from the nearby farm of Brattholt dug the final footpath down to the waterfall using picks and shovels.
Why did the outbuildings at Brattholt farm have names like London and Paris?
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Brattholt farmer Guðni Runólfsson officially named the farm's turf sheep sheds and hay barns after European cities, Lundún (London), París, Rómaborg (Rome), and Uppsalir (Uppsala), a wry rural tradition preserved by Einar Guðmundsson so farmhands heading out into a winter snowstorm with hay could announce they were travelling to London or Paris.
Related Iceland Explained Episodes
- Haukadalur Geysir Area, Iceland | Geysir & Strokkur: The Earth’s Respiratory System: Drive nine kilometers west along the 1907 King's Road from Gullfoss to the boiling silica geysers of Haukadalur.
- Brúarfoss, Iceland | The Blue Fissure Waterfall: Contrast the opaque, rock-flour-choked glacial waters of the Hvítá at Gullfoss with the crystal-clear, lava-filtered blue water of its tributary, the Brúará.
- Öxarárfoss & Drekkingarhylur | Dark History in Þingvellir: Compare Gullfoss's self-excavating Pleistocene canyon with the 930 AD human-diverted waterfall at Þingvellir.
