Two pools stacked on the bank of the Hvítá river, joined by a 6.6-metre waterfall you can walk through. Laugarás Lagoon opened in October 2025, sits 94 km from Reykjavík, and costs about half what the Blue Lagoon does.
Updated July 2026
Quick answer
Laugarás Lagoon is a geothermal bathing lagoon at Skálholtsvegur 1, 806 Selfoss, in the village of Laugarás on the Golden Circle. It opened in October 2025 and is built on two levels linked by a 6.6-metre waterfall, with the water held at 38–40 °C. Entry starts at ISK 6,900 direct, the minimum age is 8, and it lies 94 km from Reykjavík, about 1 hour 20 minutes by road, or 26 minutes from Geysir and 36 minutes from Gullfoss.
Key takeaways
best rated Entry Sold by the Lagoon Itself
Admission sold by the lagoon itself, in three tiers. All of them cover the whole outdoor area: upper pool, waterfall, grotto, forest pool, cold plunge, two saunas, plus a locker and toiletries. Lerki adds a towel and a bar drink, Ösp adds two courses at Ylja.
Live availability for the lagoon's own entry ticket. Slots run from 10:00 and the last one is sold 90 minutes before closing, which in winter means 19:30. Late afternoon is the quietest stretch on most days.
Six listings reach the lagoon and they split cleanly. One is the ticket on its own, for anyone arriving by car. Four are Golden Circle day tours from Reykjavík that end here, three of them with two hours in the water. The last is a three-day wellness trip that pairs it with the Blue Lagoon and Sky Lagoon. Prices are per person in US dollars, taken from the operators' own listings.
from $63.07Entry Only — Three Tiers Admission straight from the lagoon. All three tiers cover the whole outdoor area; Lerki adds a towel and a bar drink, Ösp adds two courses at Ylja.
Check Availability
from $220.16Coach from Reykjavík — 31 Pickups Þingvellir, Geysir and Gullfoss by coach from BSÍ, then two hours in the water. Entry is included and 31 drop-off points cover most of the city.
Read the full guide → Check Availability
from $202.96Nothing Left to Pay at the Door The only listing with the Lerki admission, towel and swim-up bar drink built into the price. Minibus, seventy minutes at Geysir, two hours in the lagoon.
Read the full guide → Check Availability
from $208Highest Rated — 5.0★ Adds an hour inside the Friðheimar greenhouse, tomato soup among the vines, ten minutes down the road from the lagoon and a two-hour soak to finish.
Read the full guide → Check Availability
from $234.27Guided in Mandarin The only lagoon day tour run entirely in Mandarin: Þingvellir, Brúarfoss, Geysir, Gullfoss, an hour on the Birki pass and the Kerið crater on the way home.
Read the full guide → Check Availability
from $1028.58Three Days — Three Lagoons Laugarás, Sky Lagoon and the Blue Lagoon over three guided days, with two nights in a central Reykjavík hotel. Group capped at ten, minimum age fourteen.
Read the full guide → Check AvailabilityThe question people arrive with is whether to swap the Blue Lagoon for this one. Prices below are the cheapest adult admission each place publishes, checked in July 2026; all four use time slots, and Blue Lagoon and Sky Lagoon also move their price by demand.
| Lagoon | From (adult) | Drive from Reykjavík | Book | Minimum age | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Laugarás Lagoon | ISK 6,900 (about $56) | 1 h 20 min, 94 km | 8 | Two levels, waterfall, grotto, cold plunge, two saunas, restaurant by a named chef | |
| Blue Lagoon | ISK 11,990 (about $96) | 50 min, on the way to the airport | 2 | Silica mud mask, towel and a drink, the largest and busiest of the four | |
| Sky Lagoon | ISK 12,990 (about $105) | 15 min from the centre | 12 | Ocean-edge infinity pool and the seven-step Skjól ritual, no food included | |
| Secret Lagoon | ISK 4,500 (about $36) | 1 h 30 min, near Flúðir | None, under 15 pays a token fee | One plain hot pool from 1891 with a small changing block, no frills |
Most of what people want to know before booking is a number: how hot, how cold, how old you have to be, how much a towel costs if you forgot one.
The site is built into the slope above the Hvítá. You enter on the upper level, and everything colder or quieter is a level down.
The big pool, and where most people spend most of the visit. The far edge is cut as an infinity edge so the water line runs into the river valley.
Smaller, quieter, and where the hot-cold circuit lives. Reviews consistently rate the sauna view here above the main pool.
Stepping stones link parts of the lower terrace and reviewers report them slippery in wet weather, take the paved route if you are unsteady.
Laugarás Lagoon sits at Skálholtsvegur 1, 806 Selfoss, in Laugarás, a small village in Bláskógabyggð that has run on geothermal heat since the 1960s, when the hot ground here was put to work under greenhouses. The lagoon opened in October 2025 on a wooded slope above the Hvítá, the glacial river that Gullfoss pours into further upstream.
The building is the first thing you notice: two grass-covered arches over dark, charred timber, set among spruce that has had sixty years to grow. It looks nothing like the lava-field starkness of the Blue Lagoon, and that is the point. You are bathing in a forest above a river valley, not on a plain of black rock.
The water comes from the Laugarás geothermal field and is cooled with glacial water drawn from the Hvítá, then naturally filtered. It carries no chlorine. That answers the question the search results are full of. Yes, the water is natural, and the mild cloudiness people notice is mineral content rather than a cleaning problem.
Admission comes in three named tiers, all of which cover the entire outdoor area. Nothing on the site is fenced off behind a higher ticket. What changes is the towel, the drink and the meal. Prices are the operator's own, converted at 124 ISK to the dollar on 30 July 2026.
The honest read: if you are bringing a towel and skipping the bar, Birki is all you need. If you are not, Lerki costs ISK 2,500 more and hands back a towel worth ISK 1,200 in rental plus a drink, so it roughly pays for itself. Ösp only makes sense if you were going to eat at Ylja anyway, and it must be booked ahead because the kitchen holds a table for you.
| Tier | From | Towel | Bar drink | Food |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Birki | ISK 6,900 (~$56) | Rental ISK 1,200 | Pay as you go | Restaurant open to all tiers |
| Lerki | ISK 9,400 (~$76) | Included | One included | Pay as you go |
| Ösp | ISK 15,900 (~$128) | Included | One included | Two courses from the day menu at Ylja |
The restaurant on site is called Ylja, and its menu was built by Gísli Matthías Auðunsson, Gísli Matt, the chef behind Slippurinn in the Westman Islands. The cooking leans on what grows in the geothermal greenhouses around the village, which is how you end up with a tomato carpaccio made from three local growers on a menu in rural South Iceland.
This is unusual for a bathing lagoon, where food is normally an afterthought at a counter. It is also the reason several reviewers rate the meal above the swim. Swimwear is not allowed in the restaurant, so budget the time to dry off and dress, an hour, realistically, on top of the bathing.
Kitchen hours run to 21:15 for most of the year and 22:00 on summer Fridays and Saturdays, and they close before the lagoon does. If you want to eat after your soak rather than before, book a late-afternoon slot rather than the last one of the day.
The drive from Reykjavík is 94 km and takes about 1 hour 20 minutes on paved roads the whole way: no F-roads, no fords, nothing that needs a four-wheel drive. From Keflavík Airport allow around 1 hour 55 minutes.
The more useful numbers are the Golden Circle ones, because almost nobody comes here as a standalone trip. Þingvellir is roughly 34 minutes away, Geysir 26 minutes, Gullfoss 36 minutes, and Selfoss 34 minutes. That geography is why the lagoon has become the closing stop on so many day tours within a year of opening: it is the natural place to end the loop.
Public transport is where it falls apart. Buses 72 and 73 do reach Laugarás, but they run no regular schedule and are built for residents rather than visitors. Without a car, the practical answer is a guided day tour. Parking on site is free.
If you already have a car, buy the entry ticket on its own and drive: you choose your slot, you stay as long as you like, and you are not watching a coach departure time. Two hours is what the tours allocate and it is enough, but only just.
If you do not, four Golden Circle day tours from Reykjavík finish here. Three give the lagoon a full two-hour stop; the Chinese-guided departure gives it an hour and spends the difference on Brúarfoss and the Kerið crater. The 9.5-hour ICELANDIA coach at $220 is the straight Golden Circle plus lagoon. The BusTravel Iceland minibus at $203 runs small-group and includes the Lerki ticket, towel and bar drink, so nothing is left to pay on arrival. The Glaciers and Waterfalls minibus at $208 adds lunch at the Friðheimar tomato greenhouse and holds a 5.0 rating from 15 reviews. There is also a Chinese-guided departure at $234 from Magic Iceland Travel, which works in Brúarfoss and Kerið and includes the Birki admission.
One thing the reviews are consistent about: in winter the daylight runs out, and a tour that reaches the lagoon at four o'clock delivers a very different experience from the same tour in July. Neither is worse. They are just not the same day out.
Icelandic pool etiquette applies here as it does everywhere in the country, and staff enforce it: every guest must shower without swimwear before entering the water. There are semi-private shower stalls as well as open ones, and two private locker rooms are set aside for guests with mobility disabilities. The whole changing-room routine is worth reading once before your first Icelandic pool. Restrooms are wheelchair accessible.
Bring or rent a towel, bring a bag for the wet swimsuit, and leave the good jewellery at the hotel. Mineral water and silver do not get on. Everything else, you can walk in without.
The lagoon runs two seasons. From 15 June to 15 August it opens 10:00–22:00 Sunday to Thursday, with the last entrance sold at 20:30, and 10:00–23:00 on Friday and Saturday with the last entrance at 21:30. From 16 August to 14 June it opens 10:00–21:00 daily, last entrance 19:30. There is no time limit on a visit; the site simply closes 1.5 hours after the last slot sold.
Midday belongs to the day tours, since all four arrive within the same window. Early morning and the last two hours before closing are the quietest. In summer that means a 20:00 slot still has hours of light in it. From September to April, a late-afternoon booking puts you in the water after dark, which is when the aurora becomes possible. There is no light pollution in the valley, and the upper pool faces away from the building.
One caveat worth planning around: this is a small site by Icelandic lagoon standards, and reviewers who arrive at peak times say so. It is not a capacity problem, it is a character one. Come at the edges of the day and it feels like a different place.
Skálholtsvegur 1, 806 Selfoss, in the village of Laugarás on the east bank of the Hvítá. Skálholt cathedral is five minutes down the same road, and Friðheimar is ten minutes north.
The water is the same temperature all year. What changes is the air you walk through to reach it, how late the doors stay open, and whether there is any darkness for the aurora.
Bars show the average daily high in the South Iceland lowlands. The lagoon holds 38–40 °C in every one of these months.
We enjoyed this so much more than the Blue Lagoon! We stayed for 3 hours and loved every minute.
This place is gorgeous. Welcoming staff, clean and spacious locker rooms; both open and semi-private showers. The water temperature is perfect and there's a swim up bar on two levels, with a staircase that goes through a waterfall. The second level has a spacious sauna and steam room, a cold plunge tub and another small hot tub in the back. The water is a little cloudy but this is a natural hot spring and to be expected.
Super relaxing experience surrounded by stunning snow covered landscape. Arrived at 2.30 so was lovely and peaceful in the sauna and steam rooms, spotless changing facilities with special products. Perfect after a morning snorkelling at Silfra.
Entry on its own is the cheapest way in by a wide margin, but only if you can drive there. Buses 72 and 73 exist and run no useful schedule, so factor a rental into the comparison rather than the ticket price alone.
Three of the four Golden Circle day tours give the lagoon a two-hour stop, which covers the pools and one sauna round comfortably. The Chinese-guided departure gives it an hour. It does not cover a sit-down meal at Ylja, so eat before or plan a separate visit.
The BusTravel Iceland minibus builds the Lerki admission, towel and bar drink into its price. On the others you are buying transport and the entry sits inside the tour price at whichever tier the operator chose, check before assuming.
Nobody under 8 gets in, and 8- to 15-year-olds need an adult. Blue Lagoon admits children from 2 and Secret Lagoon has no floor at all, so families with younger children need a different plan for this stop.
Ösp includes a table at Ylja and has to be reserved in advance. Birki and Lerki release by time slot, and the summer evening slots are the first to go because the daylight makes them the best ones.
Reviewers who compare it to the Blue Lagoon say it is smaller, and quieter, cleaner and better fed. If you want scale, this is the wrong lagoon. If you want a two-hour soak without a crowd, it is the right one.
For most Golden Circle visitors, yes. It holds 4.7 from 62 reviews, entry starts well below the Blue Lagoon and Sky Lagoon, and the recurring praise is for the quiet, the sauna view and the food. The recurring criticism is that it is smaller than the big-name lagoons and that without a car you have to buy a whole day tour to reach it.
It depends what you are optimising for. Blue Lagoon is the biggest and the easiest to fit around a flight. Sky Lagoon is 15 minutes from central Reykjavík with an ocean edge. Laugarás Lagoon is the cheapest of the three, the quietest, and the only one with a restaurant menu by a chef of Gísli Matt's standing. Secret Lagoon is cheaper still and far plainer. We put all eight side by side in the guide to Iceland's lagoons.
The water is. It comes from the Laugarás geothermal field, is cooled with glacial water from the Hvítá river, goes through natural filtration and carries no chlorine. The pools themselves are built, not natural formations, and the slight cloudiness people notice in the water is mineral content.
Secret Lagoon at Flúðir costs ISK 4,500 and is a single historic hot pool from 1891 with a simple changing block, plain, cheap and full of character. Laugarás Lagoon costs from ISK 6,900 and gives you two levels, a waterfall, a cold plunge, two saunas and a restaurant. Choose Secret Lagoon for the history and the price, Laugarás for the facilities.
Three tiers, direct from the lagoon: Birki from ISK 6,900 for entry, Lerki from ISK 9,400 adding a towel and one drink at the swim-up bar, and Ösp from ISK 15,900 adding a two-course meal at Ylja. Towel or swimsuit rental is ISK 1,200. On GetYourGuide the entry ticket starts at $63 per person.
94 km, about 1 hour 20 minutes by road, on paved roads the whole way. From Keflavík Airport allow around 1 hour 55 minutes. Within the Golden Circle it is 26 minutes from Geysir, 36 minutes from Gullfoss, 34 minutes from Þingvellir and 34 minutes from Selfoss.
Children under 8 are not admitted. Those aged 8 to 15 are welcome when an adult comes with them. This is stricter than Blue Lagoon, which admits children from 2, and looser than Sky Lagoon, where the minimum is 12. The full set of minimum ages across the country is in our guide to Iceland's lagoons with children.
Advance booking is strongly recommended and the lagoon sells by time slot. The Ösp tier must be booked ahead because it holds a restaurant table. Summer evening slots and any slot on a day when several Golden Circle tours are running are the ones that sell out first. Which slot to aim for is covered in when to visit, month by month.
Take a Golden Circle day tour from Reykjavík that ends here, four of them do, from $203 to $234 per person, each giving the lagoon a two-hour stop with hotel or bus-stop pick-up. Public buses 72 and 73 reach Laugarás but run no regular schedule, so they are not a realistic option for a day visit.
There is no public promo code. What moves the price is the tier you pick and the time slot you book, the cheapest combinations are Birki admission outside the summer evening peak. Booking through a platform adds free cancellation up to 24 hours ahead rather than a discount.
Guides
Six guides that answer the questions this page only has room to summarise.