Þakgil

The canyon walls squeeze inward, moss-covered and dripping, and at the far end a natural cave has been fitted with picnic tables and a barbecue grate. Þakgil is a campsite inside a slot canyon — you eat dinner inside the mountain and sleep surrounded by spires of volcanic rock.

Þakgil — 'Roof Canyon' — hides in a narrow glacial canyon behind Mýrdalsjökull, inside the Katla UNESCO Global Geopark. Its defining feature is a natural cave turned communal dining hall, where campers cook over flame and eat at wooden tables between rock walls; a few simple cabins and tent pitches wedge between the moss-covered hyaloclastite peaks outside. Marked trails climb from the canyon to ridgelines over the glacier and the black outwash plains of the south coast. The road in is a summer-only mountain track — open roughly June to September, normally fine for standard cars in dry conditions — and the enclosure it leads to feels sealed away from the coast entirely.