Two waterfalls, a few hundred meters apart, that couldn't be more different — one gentle, one carrying a genuinely dark legend
900m
Width of Hraunfossar
"Lava"
Hraunfossar means Lava Falls
"Children"
Barnafoss means Children's Falls
Free
To visit, shared parking
The Story
These two sit close enough to visit together, but they're really telling two different stories. Hraunfossar ("Lava Falls") isn't a single waterfall at all — it's dozens of small rivulets seeping directly out of the Hallmundarhraun lava field, a field created by an eruption beneath the glacier Langjökull centuries ago. The water simply emerges from the porous rock and trickles into the river below, spread out across nearly a kilometer of riverbank. It's quiet, wide, and strange in a peaceful way — water appearing to come from nowhere.
A short walk upstream, Barnafoss is the opposite: the same river forced through a narrow gorge, churning and violent. And it carries a genuinely dark local legend. The story goes that two young boys from a nearby farm were told to stay home while their parents went to church. Bored, they followed — taking a shortcut across a natural stone bridge that spanned the gorge above the falls. They lost their footing, fell, and drowned. Their mother, in her grief, is said to have cursed the bridge so that anyone who tried to cross it afterward would meet the same fate. Not long after, the bridge was destroyed in an earthquake.
Whether the curse or simple geology brought the bridge down, the effect was the same: it's gone.
As You Walk Around
Easy to miss if you're not looking
Notice how the water at Hraunfossar isn't flowing in from a visible stream — it's genuinely just seeping out of the lava rock itself. Look closely at the rock face and you can see individual rivulets emerging from cracks and gaps, not from any single source.
At Barnafoss, look for the remaining natural rock arch above the falls. It's not the cursed bridge from the legend — that one's long gone — but it gives you a sense of the kind of crossing the boys in the story would have attempted.
The contrast is the whole point. Standing at one, then walking a few minutes to the other, is a genuinely good example of how much Iceland's landscape can change within just a few hundred meters.
Fun Trivia
Things most visitors don't know
The two waterfalls sit on completely different rivers, geologically speaking — Hraunfossar's water never touched a river before this point; it traveled underground through lava the entire way from wherever it originated.
There's more than one version of the curse. Some tellings say the mother simply demanded the bridge be torn down; others say she used witchcraft to place a rune on it. Either way, storytellers agree on the ending.
This is the same lava field connected to Deildartunguhver and Reykholt. All three stops today sit within a few kilometers of each other, part of one continuous volcanic and cultural landscape.