Lava Horseback Riding Iceland: Ride the Moss Fields
Just outside the capital, lava horseback riding iceland puts you on a sure-footed Icelandic horse crossing moss-covered lava fields shaped by centuries-old eruptions. Riders learn the tölt, the smooth five-gait pace unique to the breed, while guides point out lava tubes, rift edges and the Bláfjöll ridgeline on the horizon. Most hestaferðir in the Reykjavik area follow marked bridle paths through the Rauðhólar pseudocraters, and lava horseback riding iceland tours pair a short paddock lesson with the trail itself so first-timers ride with confidence.
Búrfell erupted roughly 8,000 years ago, and the lava it sent north has never been cleared away. Hafnarfjörður was built on top of it.
The Búrfellshraun flow spread across some 18 square kilometres of the Reykjanes peninsula, filling valleys, damming the water that became Lake Ástjörn, and hardening into the ridged black crust that residents call, simply, the hraun. Lava horseback riding iceland tours begin on that crust, at Sörlaskeið 26, where the town's last street gives way to open rock.
The animal underfoot is older in Iceland than most of its churches. Norse settlers carried horses across in open boats during the ninth and tenth centuries, and in 982 the Althing banned the import of any more. That single law has held for more than a thousand years: no horse that leaves the island may return. The result is a compact, double-coated breed of roughly 140 centimetres, sure-footed on broken ground, and carrying five gaits rather than three — the walk, trot and canter of most breeds, plus the lateral tölt and the flying pace, skeið. Icelanders call an outing on one of them a hestaferð, and the word carries no suggestion of novelty.
Interest in horseback riding Iceland lava fields rose sharply after 2021, when Fagradalsfjall broke a nearly eight-century silence on Reykjanes and a sequence of fissure eruptions followed near Grindavík. Travellers now arrive asking how to see lava in Iceland, or whether there is a volcanic eruption in Iceland during their stay — questions the Icelandic Meteorological Office answers week by week, and no stable operates near an active vent. What the Hafnarfjörður trails offer is the other half of that answer: lava at rest, the same basalt that once ran red, cooled into ropes and rubble and covered in grey-green woolly fringe moss that takes decades to regrow wherever a hoof breaks it.
Riders climb gradually toward Helgafell, a 340-metre hyaloclastite hill shaped beneath Ice Age glaciers, past collapsed lava tubes and the sharp clinker geologists call apalhraun. Íshestar has kept stables in this corner of the capital region since 1982, and the network of Reykjavík horse riding trails maintained here remains the closest lava horseback riding iceland tour to the city itself.
2 hr 30 min
