Iceland's parliament banned horse imports around the year 982, and the ban has never been lifted. The breed that resulted is small, dense-boned and closed: no horse that leaves the island may return.
Horseback riding Iceland lava fields routes are therefore ridden on animals whose bloodlines have gone undiluted for a thousand years. The ground beneath them is younger than that in places. Hafnarfjörður sits on Búrfellshraun, a lava field poured from the Búrfell crater roughly 8,000 years ago.
Kapelluhraun, on the town's southern edge, is far more recent — flows dated to around 1151, part of the Krýsuvík fires that reshaped the Reykjanes peninsula. Both fields now lie under a grey-green skin of woolly fringe moss, which grows about a centimetre a decade and shatters underfoot. Bridle paths cross them because sheep and packhorses crossed them first: before the ring road, the tracks between Hafnarfjörður, Krýsuvík and Selvogur were the only route south. Riders on a horseback riding Iceland lava fields tour — hestaferðir, in the local phrase — still follow those alignments.
The Reykjanes system woke again at Fagradalsfjall in March 2021, ending roughly eight centuries of quiet, and the later eruptions near Sundhnúkur turned the peninsula's geology into a matter of national attention rather than academic record. Riding is one of the few ways to read that landscape at ground level, hoof by hoof, across ropy pahoehoe and collapsed lava tubes that a bus window flattens into scenery. The horse supplies the other half of the argument. Icelandic horses keep five gaits rather than three; the tölt, a four-beat lateral running walk, stays smooth enough to cross broken basalt without jarring the rider. The flying pace, skeið, is reserved for level ground and rarely used out on the flows.
East of the capital the register changes. Above Hveragerði, in the Hengill geothermal field, steam vents rise from hot river gravel and the hills turn to pale rhyolite instead of black basalt. Together the two terrains explain why Icelandic horse riding tours built around volcanic country have become the defining excursion of the southwest. Horseback riding Iceland lava fields tours ride out from stables at Sörlaskeið 26, at the harbour edge of Hafnarfjörður, where the lava itself finally reaches the sea.
2 hr 30 min
