I recently made a post about the Hildarendakirkja church which you can find here. A short distance to the west of the church is a Gluggafoss waterfall. It is located not far from the famous Eyjafjallajökull glacier/volcano in southern Iceland. I had never seen this waterfall nor driven the road that leads to it so I figured that it would be a great idea to go there.
Gluggafoss means window waterfall when translated. It's not too hard to see why. When you look at the waterfall, you can see that the water flows behind the rocks and the holes look like windows. This can be better seen in the photos below. It is approximately 44 meters tall and is often overlooked by tourists. When we were there I only saw two other people while 5 kilometers away is Seljalandsfoss and the crowds are insane there.
The waterfall changes pretty fast. 50 years ago a lot less water was seen through the "windows". This is due to a soft rock known as palagonite and water erodes it pretty quickly, speaking in geologic terms.
We decided to climb up the cliff on a narrow trail that goes next to the waterfall and see what there is to see above. Up the cliff, it was cool to see how the water managed to create an arch that water flows through.
Hiking up there was not that easy, the path is very steep and really kicks up the pulse. We were able to see more waterfalls up there.
I don't know how far or where the trail actually goes, I wish we had more time that day to go explore further but unfortunately, we did have it.
The view to the other side was also worth noting. There I was able to see the notorious Eyjafjallajökull volcano. I had never seen it from this side before.
Looking right from the volcano is a huge perfectly flat plain. You can also see the ocean and some islands in it. These are Vestmannaeyjar islands. There a plan emerged that maybe we should take a ferry tomorrow and go there, we ended up doing that but that's the subject of another post. Here is the photo.
One more photo of something that you don't see too much in Iceland, the trees!
