Skógafoss is a straight white curtain of water, 60 metres high and 25 metres wide, with no rock breaking its fall — which is why it reads as a curtain rather than a cascade. The Skóga River gathers off the Mýrdalsjökull and Eyjafjallajökull ice caps above and comes over the lip in such volume that a permanent cloud of spray hangs in front of it. On any sunny day that mist splits the light into a rainbow, often a double one, arcing right across the base; it is the image on nearly every photograph of Iceland's south coast. The green wall it falls over was once the country's coastline, and the same sheer line runs away on either side of the river, far beyond the falls, marking where the Atlantic once stopped.
Stand on the black pebble plain at its foot and the spray reaches you within a few steps, cold on your face while the ground hums with the impact. A steel staircase of 527 steps climbs the cliff on the right to a railed platform, where you look straight down the falling water to the coastal flats beyond. The river does not stop here: above the falls the Skóga strings together more than twenty further cascades. A path traces them onto the Fimmvörðuháls pass, a 25-kilometre crossing between two glaciers that climbs a thousand metres above the falls. It runs past Magni and Móði, the craters left by the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption that once buried the falls in grey ash.