Highland campsites in Iceland

Statuses are the road authority’s own, read from the umferdin.is road-number feed that also drives our F-road pages. The feed reports stretches with a condition on them, so a road it does not currently mention reads not reportedrather than being assumed clear — in April that usually means “still shut and not worth reporting on”, and in August it usually means “nothing to say”. Neither is a green light on its own.

The minimum vehicle and the usual opening are from our own F-road registry, which rates all 51 roads. They describe the gate road; a spur can be harder than the road that leads to it, and the site table below names the specific road for each campsite.

The access road on each row is our assignment, checked against the site’s coordinates and the road’s own route, with the road’s page linked so you can check it yourself. Where a site sits at the end of a chain we name the road that decides whether the trip happens at all — Dreki at Askja is reached on F88 and then F910, and F88 is the one that closes.

Rates, seasons and facilities are the operator’s own, via tjalda.is. Most interior sites publish neither a season nor a price, which is honest of them — they open when the road does. A dash means nothing is published, not that it is free. Facilities shown are the 7 that decide a night in a campervan, and in the highlands most rows are empty for a reason: at several of these places the facilities are a hut, a tap and a toilet.

What counts as a highland campsite — and what our data thinks

This page defines a highland campsite as one you cannot reach without an F-road, or cannot reach by road at all. That is a harder line than “feels remote”, and it is deliberate: it is the line that decides which car you need to book.

Not on this list, on purpose: Þakgil, Rjúpnavellir, Sandártunga and Áfangagil are all inland, all gravel, and all reachable on ordinary numbered roads in a normal car. They are on the South Iceland list where they belong.

Tagged “highlands” in our data, but not in the highlands: Geysir, Haukadal — Haukadalur, on the paved Golden Circle; Úthlíð, Biskupstungu — Úthlíð in Biskupstungur, on Route 35; Tjaldsvæði Úthlíð — Úthlíð in Biskupstungur, on Route 35; Skjól — Haukadalur, minutes from Geysir; Tjaldsvæðið við Faxa — by Faxi waterfall in Biskupstungur. All 5 are an hour from Reykjavík on tarmac. Meanwhile Landmannalaugar and everything on the Laugavegur is tagged south-coast, and Herðubreiðarlindir and the two Drekaskáli records at Askja are tagged north-iceland. A page built on that tag would have listed Geysir as a highland campsite and left out Landmannalaugar, which is why this one is built on access roads instead.

The same place, listed twice. 2 of the 32records repeat an earlier one — our data merges tjalda.is with OpenStreetMap and the two name the same ground differently. We count a pair as one place when the records are within 150 metres of each other and their names still match once the word for “campsite” is stripped off. Both keep their row and their link, because both have a live page.