A ship ties up at Strandarbakki around eight in the morning and is gone by seven. Seydisfjordur tours are built around that window: the basalt canyon inland, the puffin cliffs north, the floating pools past Egilsstaðir, and the fjord itself by boat.
Updated July 2026
Quick answer
Guided tours out of Seyðisfjörður run $102 to $407 per person and last three to seven hours, which fits the 8 to 10 hours a cruise ship spends here. Four things sit within reach of the pier: Stuðlagil Canyon (90 minutes inland), the puffin colony at Hafnarhólmi (85 minutes north), Vök Baths (32 minutes past Egilsstaðir), and the sea cliffs at the mouth of the fjord. Gufufoss waterfall is 3.6 km up the road and needs no tour at all.
Key takeaways
Most reviewed The one most people book
Rating and review count taken from the operator's own listing in July 2026.
The most-booked run inland from the pier: a coach up Jökuldalur to the west-side viewing platforms at Stuðlagil, where 30-metre basalt columns stand over the glacial river, then Gufufoss on the way back. Timed to the ship's docking window.
Pick your call date to see whether the coach still has seats. Nothing is charged today and you can cancel free up to 24 hours before departure.
Everything below leaves from the pier or the town and returns before the ship sails. Ratings and prices come from the operators' listings, checked in July 2026.
from $227 
from $227 
from $225 
from $102 
from $233 
from $407 
from $369 
from $325 
from $2,290 per group Sorted by what you actually see. The walking column is the thing people get wrong: two trips go down into the canyon on foot, the rest look at it from the rim.
| Tour | What you see | Hours | Book | Walking | Price | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canyon shore excursion | Stuðlagil rim, Gufufoss | 5 | Check | Short, made paths | $227 | 4.4 ★ (305) |
| Puffins and Gufufoss | Hafnarhólmi, turf house, waterfall | 5 | Check | Boardwalks only | $227 | 4.6 ★ (243) |
| Puffins, reindeer, waterfall | Puffin cliffs, reindeer park, Álfaborg | 6 | Check | Village walk | $225 | 4.9 ★ (22) |
| Wildlife cruise | Skálanes, sea cliffs, seals | 3 | Check | None, you stay aboard | $102 | 4.6 ★ (50) |
| Canyon and two waterfalls | Rjúkandi, Stuðlagil rim, Gufufoss | 6 | Check | Short, made paths | $233 | 4.5 ★ (20) |
| Canyon hike and baths | Canyon floor, Vök Baths | 7 | Check | 5 km round trip | $407 | 5.0 ★ (15) |
| Canyon hike and reindeer | Canyon floor, Reindeer Park | 7 | Check | 5 km round trip | $369 | 4.9 ★ (8) |
| Canyon viewpoints and baths | Stuðlagil rim, Vök Baths | 6 | Check | Short trails | $325 | 4.8 ★ (5) |
| Private jeep | Your own stops and pace | 5 | Check | Your choice | $2,290 per group | New listing |
The tours split into four types, and the split matters more than the operator names. Pick the type first.
| Type | What you get | Hours | On foot | From |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canyon by coach | Basalt columns from the rim, one or two waterfalls | 5 to 6 | A few hundred metres | $227 |
| Canyon on foot | The columns at river level, plus baths or reindeer | 7 | 5 km round trip | $369 |
| Puffins and villages | Hafnarhólmi colony, turf house, elf rock | 5 to 6 | Boardwalks, a village lane | $225 |
| Fjord by boat | Sea cliffs, seals, seabirds, no road time | 3 | None | $102 |
Every option returns to the pier at least an hour before the ship sails.
If you want the canyon and your ship is in for a normal call
book a guided coach directly. It runs the same road as the ship excursion for less, and the operators build the schedule around departure time.
If you get seasick, hate coaches, or have three hours rather than eight
take the wildlife cruise at $102. It leaves from the dock by the old blue fish factory and never touches a road.
If you are travelling the Ring Road with a car
drive Stuðlagil yourself on road 923 and skip the coach. From Egilsstaðir it is about an hour, and the guided trips exist mostly for people without a vehicle.
If you want to stay in town
walk. The piers are 0.3 km from the centre, and the blue church, Skaftfell and the harbour are all within twenty minutes on the flat.
If you are four people who want the day your way
the private jeep at $2,290 works out near the per-head price of two seats on the hiking tours, with your own stops.
Every figure below comes from the port authority, the Icelandic Met Office, or the operators' own itineraries.
Sources: Ports of Múlaþing Borgarfjörður eystri
Seyðisfjörður holds 676 people at the last count and sits at the end of a 17 km fjord with mountains on both sides. Almost everyone who comes arrives by ship, either on the ferry from Denmark or on a cruise call between May and September.
Two commercial piers take ships alongside. Strandarbakki, the south pier, handles vessels up to about 170 m; Bjólfsbakki, the north pier, takes 150 m. Depth alongside is 10 m at low tide and the maximum draft allowed is 9 m, so anything bigger than a small expedition ship anchors out in the fjord and runs a tender to the ferry terminal.
Either way you land 0.3 km from the town centre on flat ground. Guides wait in the parking area by the tender landing rather than at the standard coach stop, and most of them hold a sign with the operator's name. Saga Travel wear red jackets. Tanni Travel park a bus with the tour name in the windscreen.
A typical call gives you 8 to 10 hours ashore, arriving between 07:00 and 08:00 and sailing between 17:00 and 19:00. Tendering eats 20 to 40 minutes at each end, which is the difference between comfortably making the seven-hour canyon hike and missing your ship.
Norwegian herring merchants founded the place in 1848 and shipped the timber for their houses across the North Sea. Those buildings still line the lagoon, painted, and the reason people photograph this town rather than the larger one over the pass.
Bláa kirkjan, the blue church, stands at the top of the rainbow-painted street that runs up from the water. Skaftfell Center for Visual Art opened in 1998 and still runs the exhibitions and the bistro. LungA, the arts festival that a fifteen-year-old local started in 2000, held its twenty-fifth and last edition in July 2024 after funding ran out.
The town has an older claim too: the first telegraph cable linking Iceland to Europe came ashore here in 1906, which is why a place of a few hundred people had a newspaper, a bank and a hospital before most of the country.
Out in the fjord lies the El Grillo. German aircraft attacked the British tanker on 10 February 1944 and the crew scuttled her; she rests at about 45 m and divers still go down to her. She also still leaks oil, which the Icelandic government has spent decades trying to stop.
On 18 December 2020, after weeks of rain, the slope above the town gave way. Mudflows damaged 39 houses and destroyed 12 of them, including part of the old town by the lagoon. Nobody died, because the police had evacuated the area the day before. The government put the damage at over 1 billion Icelandic krónur.
You will see the scar on the hillside above the houses and the drainage work cut into it. Guides mention it because visitors ask, and because the rebuild is the reason a few gaps sit between the old timber buildings.
One road leaves Seyðisfjörður. Route 93 climbs from sea level over the Fjarðarheiði pass at 600 m and drops to Egilsstaðir and the Ring Road, 27 km away. In summer it is a scenic half hour. In winter it closes in storms, sometimes for days. A tunnel under the pass has been argued over for years; the 2025 transport plan put the Fjarðarheiði bore behind a competing scheme and pushed construction past 2040.
Mount Bjólfur rises 1,085 m to the west of the town and Strandartindur 1,010 m to the east. Both hold snow into June, and the thin waterfalls you see on the drive up are meltwater off those faces.
The Smyril Line ferry Norröna docks here weekly in summer, sailing from Hirtshals in Denmark by way of Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands. It is the only car ferry between Iceland and another country, which is how most of the campervans you meet in the east arrived.
| Where | From the pier | By road | Tours that go |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gufufoss waterfall | 3.6 km | 4 minutes | Nearly all of them, as the last stop |
| Egilsstaðir | 27.2 km | 25 minutes | Pickup point for the Tanni trips |
| Vök Baths | 32.6 km | 32 minutes | Two canyon tours and the private jeep |
| Hafnarhólmi, Borgarfjörður Eystri | 92.9 km | 84 minutes | Both puffin tours |
| Stuðlagil Canyon | 98.8 km | 90 minutes | Six of the trips listed above |
You do not need a tour for any of these. From either pier they are a flat walk of a few minutes.
The tourist information centre by the harbour is where most guided trips meet.
Nobody photographed Stuðlagil before 2009 because nobody could see it. The Kárahnjúkar hydro scheme filled the Hálslón reservoir that year and cut the flow of the Jökulsá á Dal by seven to eight metres. The water that fell away had been hiding a gorge of basalt columns, some of them 30 m high, twisted rather than neatly hexagonal.
There are two sides and they are not the same trip. The west side is reached at the farm Grund, where a staircase drops to a viewing platform over the gorge. You look down at the columns. That is what the coach tours do, and it takes twenty minutes on your feet.
The east side starts near the farm Klaustursel and is walked in: about 2.5 km each way on flat gravel, two gentle rises, an hour at a steady pace. You end up beside the river with the columns above you. Two of the trips here do that hike, and both run seven hours because of it.
The colour depends on the dam. The river runs turquoise while the flow is low, and turns grey when the reservoir spills, usually from late August. Photographs that sold you on the place were shot in June or July.
Stuðlagil sits about an hour from Egilsstaðir on road 923 off the Ring Road, and 90 minutes from the pier. That distance is what makes every canyon trip 5 to 7 hours, whatever the operator.
About 10,000 pairs of puffins nest on the harbour islet at Borgarfjörður Eystri, and the village has built boardwalks and a hide right through the colony. Birds sit a metre or two from the rail. There are no burrows to fall into and no cliff edge to lean over, which makes it the easiest puffin watching in Iceland and the reason two operators run coaches there.
They are ashore from mid-April to mid-August, with the best numbers from May. After that the young leave and the adults go back out to sea, so an August-end call finds an empty rock. Kittiwakes, fulmars and eiders nest alongside them. Entry costs nothing, though the village asks for donations.
The drive is an hour and a half each way from Seyðisfjörður, over one pass and along the coast, which sets the length of both puffin tours. Operators fill the rest with the village: Lindarbakki, a red turf house from 1899 that someone still lives in, and Álfaborg, the rock above the church that Icelandic folklore gives to the queen of the elves.
Vök Baths opened in July 2019 on Lake Urriðavatn, five minutes past Egilsstaðir and 32 minutes from the pier. Two pools float out in the lake on decking, held at 38 to 41°C, fed from boreholes that come up at about 75°C and get cooled on the way in. The water is certified drinkable, which no other spa in Iceland can say. There is a sauna, a cold mist tunnel, a tea bar in the water and a bistro.
Bring a swimsuit and a towel. Neither is included on the tours that stop here, and hiring them costs extra at the desk.
The Reindeer Park sits on the same road. Iceland's reindeer came from Norway in the 1770s and the eastern highlands hold the only wild herd in the country; the animals in the park were rescued as abandoned calves. Two trips visit it, and the one that pairs it with the canyon hike is the highest rated of them.
One trip leaves the road behind. A three-hour cruise runs out from the old blue fish factory dock, past waterfalls that drop straight into the sea, into the Skálanes nature reserve 17 km along the fjord, and under Skálanesbjarg, one of the highest sea cliffs in Iceland.
Puffins and fulmars nest on those walls, seals lie on the rocks below, and whales turn up often enough that the operator mentions them without promising. At $102 it is the cheapest thing running here and the only one you can do in a short call. Take a windproof layer: it is colder on the water than in town, whatever the forecast says.
Seyðisfjörður takes over 1,650 mm of rain a year, roughly twice what Reykjavík gets, and the mountains on both sides make their own weather. July highs average 13°C. Nobody here dresses for the forecast.
Rain and day temperature from the Icelandic Met Office record for Seyðisfjörður, 1981 to 2000. The bars show why the tours cluster into four months.
The cruise season runs May to September and peaks June to August. Puffins are ashore mid-April to mid-August, and the river at Stuðlagil holds its turquoise until the reservoir spills, usually from late August.
The town lies at the head of its fjord on the east coast, with Egilsstaðir and the Ring Road over the pass to the west.
Stuðlagil is inland to the southwest, Borgarfjörður Eystri along the coast to the north.
Bars are drawn against a nine-hour call. Road time counts both directions, taken from the operators' own itineraries and checked against driving times.
Operators build their schedules to return at least an hour before the ship sails. If your call is shorter than eight hours, the boat trip and the rim tours are the safe choices.
Verified reviews from the operators' listings, July 2026.
Michael was our guide. He did a great job telling us about the area, coordinating with us when the ship changed to tendering and everyone was delayed in leaving to get there. Still were able to see and do everything with plenty of time.
Stuðlagil Canyon and Waterfalls
We had a wonderful time on this tour! Saga was our guide and she was a joy! She shared her personal experiences as an Icelander while sharing the lore of the country. The puffins were so pretty and plentiful! The countryside is beautiful and the stop at the village for an Icelandic doughnut and coffee was an extra bonus.
Puffin and Gufufoss Waterfall Tour
Excellent tour. Beautiful day and we saw tons of puffins. Our guide shared so many stories about the area and has family which has lived there for generations.
Wildlife cruise from Seyðisfjörður
Quoted as written, with the reviewer's own name, country and date from the operator's listing.
Every price, rating and review count here was read off the operator's own booking page in July 2026, in US dollars, and is dated on the page.
The distances come from routing the actual roads, then compared against the minute-by-minute itineraries the operators publish. Where they disagreed, we used the operator's number.
The quotes above are copied as written, with the reviewer's country and the month they sailed. We do not shorten them into something warmer.
A puffin tour in September is a coach ride to an empty cliff, and the canyon runs grey after the reservoir spills. Both are on this page rather than buried.
You book on the operator's own site, at the operator's price. We earn a commission if you do, and it changes nothing about what you pay.
Everything is measured against the hours a ship actually gives you, including the 20 to 40 minutes a tender takes at each end.
Yes, for two reasons that have nothing to do with each other. The town itself is the best preserved of Iceland's Norwegian timber settlements, founded in 1848, and you can walk all of it in an hour from the pier. Beyond it sit Stuðlagil Canyon and the puffin colony at Hafnarhólmi, both of which draw people across the country. If your ship stops here for 8 to 10 hours, there is more within reach than you can fit, and the town itself fills a comfortable morning on foot.
Four things fill a call. A coach to Stuðlagil Canyon takes five to seven hours depending on whether you take the viewing platforms or walk into the gorge. A coach north to the Hafnarhólmi puffin colony takes five to six. A three-hour boat trip runs out to the sea cliffs at the fjord mouth for $102. And the town itself, 0.3 km from either pier, holds the blue church, the rainbow street, Skaftfell and the harbour, which is a comfortable morning on foot.
Not in Seyðisfjörður itself. The colony is at Hafnarhólmi in Borgarfjörður Eystri, an hour and a half north by road, where about 10,000 pairs nest from mid-April to mid-August. Two coach tours from the pier go there, both around $225 to $227, and the village has boardwalks and a hide through the colony. Entry is free. You can also see puffins on the water from the three-hour wildlife cruise, at a greater distance.
Four operators run out of this pier and they do different jobs. BusTravel Iceland carries the volume and holds the most reviews, 305 on the canyon run and 243 on the puffin one. Tanni Travel run smaller minibuses and the two hiking trips, which are the highest rated at 5.0 and 4.9. Saga Travel and Magic Iceland Travel each run one coach with the extra stops. For a first call and a fixed budget, the BusTravel trips are the safest booking; for the canyon floor, Tanni are the only ones who go down.
Only with a car, and there is no rental desk in Seyðisfjörður. The canyon is 98.8 km from the pier, about 90 minutes each way on Route 93 and then road 923 off the Ring Road. If you are driving Iceland yourself, go direct and skip the coach. Off a ship, a guided trip is the practical way, which is why most of the trips listed here go there, from a coach to the rim to a private jeep.
No. The west side at the farm Grund has a staircase down to a viewing platform over the gorge, which is where the coach tours stop, and it costs you twenty minutes on your feet. The east side, from Klaustursel, is 2.5 km each way on flat gravel and puts you beside the river with the columns overhead. Two trips do that walk and both run seven hours.
Add 20 to 40 minutes at each end, which the cruise port guide covers in detail. Ships over about 170 m anchor in the fjord rather than tie up at Strandarbakki or Bjólfsbakki, and the tender lands by the ferry terminal. Operators know this and wait in the parking area opposite the tender landing rather than at the standard meeting point. On a tendered call, the seven-hour hiking trips get tight; the rim tours and the boat do not.
While the flow stays low, which in most years means June through the middle of August. When the Hálslón reservoir spills, usually from late August, the Jökulsá á Dal runs grey and stays that way. The columns are the same either way, but the photographs that sold you the place were taken in early summer.
Every tour listed here cancels free up to 24 hours before departure and takes no payment when you book. Weather matters more than usual on this coast, and what happens when a trip is called off is worth reading first: Route 93 crosses the Fjarðarheiði pass at 600 m, and the town takes over 1,650 mm of rain a year. Operators cancel and refund when the road shuts.
Skaftfell Center for Visual Art has been showing work since 1998 and has a bistro upstairs. The blue church, Bláa kirkjan, runs a summer concert series on Wednesday evenings. The technical museum and the old telegraph station cover the 1906 cable that made this town the first place in Iceland connected to Europe. All of it is inside the 0.3 km walk from the pier.
Guides
Short guides to the questions that come up once the trip is chosen.