Iceland

The meeting point of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, Þingvellir is a rift valley where you can walk or dive between two continents in crystal-clear glacial water. The site is also where Iceland's parliament — the Alþing, founded in 930 AD — met for centuries, making it both a geological and cultural landmark of extraordinary significance.

The largest glacier in Europe by volume, covering 8% of Iceland's entire land area, Vatnajökull is a world of blue ice tunnels, glacier mills, and ice caves accessible from November through March. The crystal ice caves, formed each winter as meltwater carves new passages through the blue ice, change shape every year and are never the same twice — visited on guided tours that keep numbers low enough to preserve the silence.

A lagoon formed by the retreat of Breiðamerkurjökull glacier, Jökulsárlón is filled with luminescent blue and white icebergs calved from the glacier face, which float out to sea across the black volcanic beach known as Diamond Beach. The icebergs range in size from armchair to house, and the combination of brilliant white ice on black sand at the edge of the Atlantic is one of Iceland's most dramatic landscapes.

Iceland's most remote and least-visited region, the Westfjords is a deeply indented peninsula of sheer bird-cliffs, fjords, and hot springs accessible only by a narrow coastal road or small aircraft. Látrabjarg, the westernmost point of Europe, is home to millions of nesting seabirds — puffins, razorbills, and guillemots so accustomed to visitors that they can be approached within touching distance on the cliff top.

A highland landscape of multicolored rhyolite mountains — streaked in green, yellow, red, and purple — natural hot springs, and lava fields in the interior of Iceland, Landmannalaugar is the starting point of the Laugavegur trail, widely considered Europe's finest multi-day hiking route. The hot spring pools, surrounded by snow-patched mountains, offer one of the world's great natural bathing experiences.

A 90-kilometer peninsula on Iceland's west coast dominated by the glacier-capped Snæfellsjökull volcano — the setting for Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth — Snæfellsnes is a concentrated miniature of everything Iceland offers: volcanic craters, lava tubes, black sand beaches, fishing villages, seal colonies, and the glacier itself, accessible by guided snowmobile. The peninsula receives a fraction of the visitors of the Golden Circle despite comparable natural drama.