Are there hot springs in Iceland?

Those four numbers sum to 359. One place appears in two of these datasets at the same coordinates and is counted once here. Places that merely share a name are notmerged: our data names unnamed springs after the municipality they sit in, so six different springs can all be “Geothermal hot spring near Borgarbyggð” while lying tens of kilometres apart. Every figure on this page is computed from the data when the page is built, so it moves when the data moves rather than sitting here as a number somebody typed.

What this count is not: a survey of Iceland’s geothermal geology. There are thousands of individual hot springs in the country if you count every vent in every field — Hveravellir alone is dozens. This is the number of distinct places a traveller could go to, each with a name, a position and a page.

Most of the confusion in the numbers above comes from four words used interchangeably. They are not the same thing, and which one you search for decides what you get shown.

The practical consequence: if you search “hot springs in Iceland” you will be shown the same nine famous places over and over. If you search geothermal pool you get the 98 municipal pools, which is where Icelanders actually go, costs roughly a tenth as much, and is open in February.

North Iceland holds the most of anywhere at 71 places, which is not where the tour buses go. The pattern worth noticing is that the south and the Reykjanes peninsula — the two areas nearly every “best hot springs” list is built from — are not where the density is. They are where the drive times are short.

The highlands entry comes with a hard seasonal caveat: those springs sit behind F-roads, which are shut for most of the year. See when the F-roads open before planning a soak at Hveravellir or Strútslaug.

This is the question the count does not answer on its own. Below is a hand-picked list of natural, free springs that people genuinely soak in — chosen one at a time, because nothing in the underlying data marks the difference between a gentle farm hot pot and boiling mud. Every municipal pool and every ticketed lagoon in the count above is obviously bathable; it is the wild category that needs curating.

Free here means no gate and no till. It does not mean public: most of these sit on private land, several are barely deeper than a bath, and access at any of them is a courtesy that can be withdrawn — one of the north’s best-known hot pots was closed by its landowner in June 2026 and most travel pages still describe the walk in. Read the etiquette guide before you go, and the free springs guide for the longer list with directions.

Iceland has no lifeguard on a lava field. A meaningful share of what gets mapped and described as a “hot spring” is geothermal ground that is well above boiling — and in the raw data these records look identical to the hot pots above, field for field. Some of the best-known names in the country are in this category:

The rule that keeps people out of hospital is simple and it is not negotiable: stay on the marked path in any geothermal area, and test unfamiliar water with a hand before any other part of you. Crusted ground next to a steaming pool can be a thin lid over water hot enough to cause third-degree burns in seconds, and the temperature of a wild spring can change without anything visible changing on the surface.