Katla Ice Cave Tour

You’ll experience many natural wonders on our Katla ice cave tour, including an 800-year-old ice cave with black, white, and blue ice, a visit to a private black sand beach, and a super jeep ride through iconic film set locations.

Tour Itinerary

Our day begins at the Katlatrack meeting point (N1 gas station) in Vik. From here, our super jeep heads high up into the mountains for a ride towards the glacier. Along the way, you’ll get to admire the distinctive green mountains and many other spectacular sights, tones, and textures as we make our way through the glaciers and ice formations. 

The first stop is at the front of Kötlujökull – the Katla outlet glacier. Kötlujökull is actually part of the famous Mýrdalsjökullglacier – the fourth largest glacier in Iceland. Your safety is paramount at all times, so your glacier guide will fit you up with some loan equipment (a helmet, headlamp, and crampons) and provide you with a full safety briefing. 

From here, it’s a fun 10 to 15-minute glacier hike across the ice to explore your first ice cave! You’ll marvel at the magnificent colors and textures inside the ice cave, and the crazy shapes and crystal ice will leave you in awe. Your guide will share the history of the Iceland ice cave and explain how it was formed. You’ll learn how the volcanic eruptions of the Katla volcano caused the ash and sand to combine with the ice, to form the incredible shades of black and blue that appears almost like ‘dragon glass’. There will be plenty of ice cave photo opportunities, and plenty of time to ask questions and learn all you wish to know about these magnificent icy structures.

After some time in the main cave, we’ll take another short glacier walk as we hunt for secret waterfalls and hidden glacier canyons. You may have heard that visiting an ice cave is a “Once in a lifetime experience” – this couldn’t be truer, and we love nothing more than sharing this very unique experience with our guests! Iceland’s ice caves are constantly shifting and changing with the seasons, so the caves that you will experience on your glacier tour will never exist in the same form again. We are always scouting the glacier ice for new and hidden caves, so we know exactly where to find the most spectacular (and the safest) ice caves to show you on our tours. Some of these caves are on private land that can only be accessed with a private guide, so it is also possible that your tour will include a visit to a secret ice cave. We’ll also explore one or two other ice caves, depending upon the current conditions on the glacier.

After our ice caving adventure, we’ll head back to the super jeep for our next destination: a private black sand beach. You will already be very familiar with Iceland’s most famous black sand beach, Reynisfjara, and we definitely recommend that you explore this beach in your own time. However, your guide will prefer to take you off the beaten path on this tours.  Therefore, we will visit a lesser-known black sand beach that you can explore and enjoy in privacy – far away from the tourist crowds!

Finally, our jeep then takes an exciting detour through the wild terrain as we drive through the actual film set from Star Wars Rogue One. You’ll see exactly where the opening scenes were shot as your guide shares the entire behind the scenes details. We then take in some more filming locations on our way home, as we visit the film sets of some other favorites, such as Transformers, Noah, and Oblivion. Along the way, you will also enjoy some other memorable sights from the comfort of the jeep, including the historical promontory of Hjörleifshöfði (named after one of the first Viking settlers in Iceland), the distinctive Reynisdrangar sea stacks, and of course, the beautiful local area around Vik.