Lava drained out of this tube 5,200 years ago and left a corridor 30 meters wide beneath the Þrengsli road, lit and bridged along the first stretch. Pick the Raufarhólshellir lava tunnel tour that suits how you are travelling, and book with free cancellation.
Updated July 2026
Quick answer
Every Raufarhólshellir lava tunnel tour walks the same lit footbridge for about 55 to 60 minutes, so the price you pay decides how you get there, not what you see. Meeting at the cave costs $67.07 to $70.48. Riding out from Reykjavík costs $151.19 by bus. One tour goes further: the Lava Falls Adventure carries on past the lighting to the far end of the tube for $219.39.
Key takeaways
top pick The Tour Most People Book
Rating and review count are the operator's own figures as published on GetYourGuide.
Explore an underground lava tube created by the mighty power of a volcanic eruption over 5,000 years ago on a journey through the Raufarhólshellir lava tunnel. Experience one of the longest lava tubes in Iceland, easily accessible all year round.
Prices checked July 2026.
Live availability for the $70.48 Underground Expedition, the tour that meets at the cave entrance. Departures run on the hour and the middle of the day fills first in July and August, when tour buses from Reykjavík land between 10:00 and 14:00.
These three put you on the same footbridge for the same hour with the same operator, and the gap between them is transport. Read the meeting point before you read the price: two start at the cave, one starts at a bus terminal in Reykjavík. The fourth tour, which goes past the lighting, sits further down this page.
from $70.48Most Reviewed — 1,942 Reviews The standard hour underground: a walkway through the 5,000-year-old tube, helmet and headlamp handed out at the entrance, open year-round.
Read the full guide → Check Availability
from $67.07Lowest Price The cheapest way into the tunnel. One to three hours depending on how the group moves, along the same route through the lava tube.
Read the full guide → Check Availability
from $151.19Round-Trip Bus from Reykjavik Adds the transport: bus from Reykjavik and back, three hours in total, for anyone without a car. The tunnel walk itself is unchanged.
Read the full guide → Check AvailabilityThe cave charges for an hour on the footbridge. Everything above that hour is the road. Driving yourself to the entrance and taking the operator's own tour costs $70.48; the ICELANDIA bus from the BSÍ terminal costs $151.19 for the same guided hour, a difference of about $81 per person. If two of you have a rental car parked outside the guesthouse, that gap is $162 to sit on a bus.
| Option | Price | Total time | Book | Inside the cave | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Underground Expedition | $70.48 | 1 hour | Check | 55 to 60 min | Driving yourself |
| Arctic Adventures tour | $67.07 | 1 or 3 hours | Check | 1 hour | Cheapest, works either way |
| ICELANDIA bus | $151.19 | 3 hours | Check | 1 hour | No car, hotel pickup |
| Lava Falls Adventure | $219.39 | 3 hours | Check | To the lava falls | An hour sounds short |
goes deeper The Tour That Goes Past the Lighting
Rating and review count are the operator's own figures as published on GetYourGuide.
Travel deep into one of Iceland's largest lava tubes. Go off the beaten path on an underground adventure and explore the source of the cave, the magnificent lava falls.
Prices checked July 2026.
Raufarhólshellir is the fourth-longest lava tube in Iceland and the only one of the big four you can reach in a 30-minute drive from the capital. The numbers below are what the guide will point at while you stand under them, and they explain why this cave took a footbridge and floodlights while others take a rope.
A lava tube is a drainpipe that outlived its water. When the Leitahraun eruption sent low-viscosity lava down this slope 5,200 years ago, the surface of the flow cooled into a crust while the molten rock underneath kept running. The crust thickened into a roof. Once the eruption stopped, the lava inside drained downhill and out, and the roof stayed up over an empty corridor 1,360 meters long.
The vent that fed it sits 10 kilometers uphill, east of the Bláfjöll mountains. Everything you walk past inside was liquid at the same moment: the ledges along the walls mark where the lava level paused on its way down, and the ripples underfoot froze mid-flow. Nothing here was carved. It was drained.
Near the mouth the roof has collapsed in three places, and each hole drops a column of light onto the floor. On a clear winter afternoon the light lands blue on old ice. Photographers work this section hardest, and it is the one part of the tour where you get daylight and cave in the same frame.
Past the skylights the roof closes over and the floodlighting takes over. The walkway lights are set low and warm rather than white, which is a deliberate choice: they show the rock without flattening it.
The colour comes from minerals in the rock reacting with air and water over five thousand years. Iron gives the deep rust and red, and copper and other traces account for the greens and the purple-grey. Guides turn the walkway lights off at one point so the group stands in absolute darkness, which sounds like a gimmick until it happens and you understand that there is no such thing as your eyes adjusting down here.
The cave used to hold far more than colour. Lava stalactites hung across whole stretches of the roof until visitor numbers grew from the 1950s onward, and the fragile lava straws were snapped off one by one by people who wanted a souvenir. Almost none survive.
By 2015 more than 20,000 people a year were walking into Raufarhólshellir unsupervised, with head torches, spray paint and no rules. The owners closed it in late 2016. Crews hauled out several metric tons of rubbish, then built the elevated walkway, ran power in for the lighting, and reopened in mid-2017 with access by guide only.
That history is why you cannot park at the entrance and wander in today. It is also why the floor is intact. The trade the operator made was infrastructure and a gate in exchange for the cave surviving another century, and standing on the bridge you can see both halves of that bargain at once.
The tube was a filming location for the 2014 film Noah with Anthony Hopkins, and it turns up in the Netflix series Sense8. In June 2017 the Secret Solstice festival ran concerts inside it, using the natural acoustics of a 30-meter-wide basalt corridor.
Guides tell these stories on the walkway, and the tour leans on them. If you came for geology rather than film trivia, the Lava Falls Adventure is the version that spends its time on the rock.
Four stages separate a moving lava flow from the corridor you walk through. The section you visit on a standard tour is the lit front third; the dark two thirds beyond it belong to the adventure tour.
Lava from the Leitahraun eruption runs downhill from a vent 10 kilometers away. Air chills the surface into a hard crust while the rock underneath stays molten and keeps moving.
The skin thickens until it can hold its own weight. Insulated from the air, the lava underneath runs hotter and faster inside its own pipe, cutting the channel wider and deeper.
The eruption stops feeding the tube. What is left inside runs downhill and out, leaving a void up to 30 meters wide and 10 meters high, with ledges on the walls marking each pause in the level.
Sections of the ceiling collapse over the following centuries. Three of those holes near the entrance became the skylights, and the rubble piles under them are what you climb past on the first minutes of the walk.
Cross-section is schematic. Depth below the surface varies along the tube, and Route 39 crosses over the widest part of it.
From Reykjavík it is a 30-minute drive: Route 1 east for about 18 km, then south onto Route 39, the Þrengsli road, for another 12 km. The reception building and car park sit on the left. Route 39 is paved, gritted through winter and open to a two-wheel-drive rental, and it doubles as the low-altitude alternative when Hellisheiði closes in a storm.
Hveragerði lies 15 km east of the turn-off, which puts the cave on the way to the south coast, Kerið and the Golden Circle. Most people fit it either side of a Selfoss lunch.
Access is by guide only, and has been since the 2017 reopening. The gate at the entrance stays locked between departures, so a walk-up without a booking is a wasted drive in high season. Departures run on the hour from 9:00 to 17:00, and the site is open every day of the year, including Christmas week.
Groups gather at the reception building, where the guide hands out a helmet and a headlamp, and crampons through the winter months. Coffee and toilets are there too, which matters more than it sounds on the way back from the south coast.
The cave holds 3 to 4°C in every month, so nobody freezes on a one-hour walk. Water is the problem. Meltwater and rain work through the rock and drip from the roof all year, and the drips land on your shoulders and your camera.
What to bring:
The route in and out crosses uneven ground and a steep set of steps before the footbridge starts, and parts of the floor are left as the lava made them. Operators say the tour does not suit anyone who has trouble with balance, rough surfaces or stairs. There is no wheelchair access.
Minimum age is 3 years when you meet at the cave and 6 years on the Arctic Adventures pickup, since that ticket includes a bus. The Lava Falls Adventure is 12 and over, and it asks for decent fitness: three to four hours, no walkway underfoot for most of it, and scrambling over collapsed roof material.
The rock does not change. The entrance does. Ice sculptures grow inside the mouth of the cave from late autumn, reach their best in December, January and February, and melt back through spring. Crampons come out over the same months and are handed to you at reception.
Daylight is the other variable. In December you drive both ways in the dark, which makes an 11:00 departure the sensible pick; in June the road is lit until midnight and a 17:00 tour leaves the whole evening free.
| Months | Inside the cave | Getting there | Crowds |
|---|---|---|---|
| December to February | Ice sculptures at their biggest, crampons issued | Dark both ways, Route 39 gritted | Quietest, book a day ahead |
| March to May | Ice retreating, meltwater dripping hard | Light returns fast, roads clear | Building through May |
| June to August | No ice, driest floor of the year | Daylight until midnight | Busiest, midday departures sell out |
| September to November | First ice forms near the mouth | Storms can close Hellisheiði, not Route 39 | Quiet again after September |
The operator sells the same standard tour on its own site for 8,900 ISK, and its bus package from Reykjavík for 14,900 ISK. At 125 ISK to the dollar in July 2026 that is about $71 and $119. The Lava Falls tour lists at 27,900 ISK.
So the on-location tours cost roughly the same wherever you book, and the difference sits in the transport packages. Booking through a platform buys you free cancellation up to 24 hours before departure and payment in your own currency, which is worth something on a trip where weather rearranges plans.
The cave sits off Route 39 in Þrengsli, 35 km southeast of Reykjavík and 15 km west of Hveragerði. Type Raufarhólshellir into a satnav and it lands you at the reception car park.
Coordinates N63°56.407 W021°23.742. Parking is free and sits on the left as you come south on Route 39.
People compare four underground trips in Iceland, and only two of them are lava tubes you can drive to in a morning from Reykjavík. This is what separates them.
1,360 meters long and the fourth-longest in Iceland. Wide, tall and floodlit for the first stretch, with skylights at the entrance and ice sculptures in winter. The only one of these four that runs every day of the year, and the cheapest to reach.
Longer at 1,585 meters and the biggest by volume in Iceland, with lava stalactites still in place because it was gated early. It is a 1.5-hour drive each way from the capital, so it eats a day rather than a morning.
Small and vertical: 200 meters of passage on two levels inside Snæfellsjökull National Park, visited on a 45-minute tour. Worth pairing with the peninsula rather than driving out for on its own.
A drained magma chamber rather than a lava tube, entered by a window-cleaner's lift that lowers you 120 meters into the void. It runs from about May to October and costs several times what any cave here does.
Distances are one-way road distances from Reykjavík. Þríhnúkagígur closes for winter; the three lava caves stay open.
Three clips filmed inside Raufarhólshellir: the operator's own caving footage from past the walkway, a short tour of the lit section, and a visitor's full run from the entrance to the turnaround.
The operator films the deep route the Lava Falls Adventure tour uses, past the end of the lighting.
Video: The Lava TunnelThe lit section as it looks on the standard hour: footbridge, skylights and the colour in the walls.
Video: Guide to IcelandA visitor's full walkthrough of the standard tour, entrance slope to turnaround.
Video: Eclectic EmissaryVideos are hosted on YouTube and load only when you press play.
Nice easy trip down the tunnel. Plenty of space in the tunnel 15+ feet wide and high in most areas and even for my claustrophobic wife it was not an issue. The guide was very helpful in explaining the whole episode that created the tunnel.
This was a fun quick activity that taught us a little bit about lava flow and tunnels it left behind. It was a beautiful little hike in our guide was very informative.
Dmitri, the guide at the tunnel, was fantastic. Very informative and great sense of humour. It was informative and fun
Quotes come from the GetYourGuide listings for the tours on this page, reproduced as written.
Standard tours all buy the same 55 to 60 minutes on the same footbridge with the same operator. Price differences are transport and pickup, so start from how you are getting there rather than from the cheapest number.
The gap between meeting at the cave for $70.48 and riding out for $151.19 is about $81 a head. With a rental car outside your guesthouse and a 30-minute drive, that is the easiest money to keep on an Iceland trip.
The recurring complaint on all three standard listings is that the time inside feels short, especially on the bus tour where an hour underground sits inside a three-hour round trip. Know it before you book, not after.
The Lava Falls Adventure runs three to four hours, drops the walkway, hands out head torches and goes to the end of the tube where the lava falls are. It is 12 and over, needs fitness, and holds 4.9 from 41 reviews.
Ice sculptures at the entrance from December through February, crampons at the door and quieter departures. Summer gives you dry floors, long light and midday slots that sell out first.
Departures run on the hour from 9:00 to 17:00. In December an 11:00 slot keeps the drive in daylight; in June a 17:00 slot leaves the whole evening free. Free cancellation runs to 24 hours before.
For $70.48 and an hour of your day, yes, with one caveat that shows up in review after review: the time inside feels short. What you get is a floodlit walk through a 1,360-meter lava tube that is 30 meters wide in places, three collapsed skylights dropping daylight onto the floor, mineral colour on the walls and a lights-out moment in total darkness. What you do not get is a half-day. If an hour sounds thin, the Lava Falls Adventure at $219.39 spends three to four hours underground and reaches the far end. The tour that disappoints people most often is the $151.19 bus, where the same hour sits inside a three-hour round trip. What the hour underground actually holds is written up minute by minute.
The tube runs 1,360 meters, which makes it the fourth-longest lava tube in Iceland. The main tunnel accounts for about 900 meters of that before splitting into three smaller branches at the far end. Standard tours cover the front section on a lit footbridge in 55 to 60 minutes; the rest, including the lava falls in the branches, is reached only on the Lava Falls Adventure and its 1.3 km of caving.
For a morning out of Reykjavík, Raufarhólshellir: 35 km from the city, open every day of the year, with a footbridge that suits children from age 3. For the longest and best-preserved cave, Víðgelmir in Borgarfjörður runs 1,585 meters and still has its lava stalactites, but it is a 1.5-hour drive each way. Vatnshellir on Snæfellsnes is the smallest of the three at 200 meters, entered by a spiral staircase 35 meters down, and it makes sense as part of a peninsula day rather than a trip in itself.
It depends on what you want to stand inside. Raufarhólshellir puts you in a lava tube left by an eruption 5,200 years ago, runs year-round and costs $67.07 to $219.39. Þríhnúkagígur lowers you 120 meters into a drained magma chamber by lift, but only from about May to October and at several times the price. Eruption-site hikes on the Reykjanes peninsula depend entirely on whether anything is erupting and on the day's gas readings. Of the three, the lava tunnel is the one that runs in January and does not get cancelled by weather.
No. Access is by guide only. The cave was open to anyone until late 2016, when more than 20,000 unsupervised visitors a year and several metric tons of rubbish forced the owners to close it. It reopened in mid-2017 with an elevated walkway, lighting and a gate. Every visit now goes through a booked departure from the reception building at the entrance.
Meeting at the cave costs $67.07 with Arctic Adventures or $70.48 with the operator's own Underground Expedition. The ICELANDIA bus from the BSÍ terminal in Reykjavík is $151.19 including transport both ways. The Lava Falls Adventure is $219.39. Booked direct on the operator's site the standard tour lists at 8,900 ISK and the bus package at 14,900 ISK, about $71 and $119 at 125 ISK to the dollar in July 2026.
Drive Route 1 east for 18 km, then turn south onto Route 39, the Þrengsli road, and continue 12 km to the car park on the left. The whole trip is 35 km and takes about 30 minutes on a paved road that stays open through winter. Without a car, the ICELANDIA tour leaves the BSÍ terminal and offers hotel pickup, and the Arctic Adventures ticket has a pickup option with 24 drop-off points across the city. Both are broken down in getting there from Reykjavík without a car.
A waterproof jacket first: the roof drips in every season and the cave holds 3 to 4°C all year. Add a warm mid layer, hiking shoes with grip for the wet rock at the entrance, and gloves and a hat between October and April. The helmet, headlamp and winter crampons come with every tour. Leave anything you cannot get wet in the car.
Minimum age is 3 when you meet at the cave and 6 on the Arctic Adventures pickup option, since that one includes a bus. The Lava Falls Adventure is 12 and over. The footbridge covers most of the route, but the way in and out crosses uneven ground and a steep flight of steps, so operators advise against it for anyone with balance problems or difficulty on stairs. There is no wheelchair access.
December through February for ice: sculptures grow inside the entrance where cold air and daylight reach through the collapsed roof, and they are at their biggest in those three months. June through August for daylight and dry floors, with midday departures selling out first. The cave itself sits at 3 to 4°C whatever the calendar says, and departures run every day of the year from 9:00 to 17:00.
Plan the visit
Nine guides to the cave and the tours that go into it, written from the gate on Route 39.