Each entry provides coordinates for safe parking and viewpoints, alongside season and access notes. The files are waypoints. Your own mapping app — Gaia GPS, OsmAnd, Organic Maps, a Garmin — does the routing. The KML, GPX and GeoJSON files live on your device, so the waypoints work with no signal. Downloading offline map tiles is a separate step inside your mapping app.
When you purchase an Iceland lighthouse map, you may receive geospatial files such as a GPX (GPS Exchange Format) file, a KML (Keyhole Markup Language) file, or a GeoJSON file.
As detailed in the Google KML documentation and the IETF RFC 7946 GeoJSON specification , these open standards store geographic coordinates, feature labels, and access metadata as structured attributes that GIS and mapping engines render directly on your screen.
Every entry inside the file represents an individual coastal light or headland beacon. A waypoint in our dataset consists of five specific elements:
- Latitude and longitude: A WGS 84 decimal coordinate pair resolved directly to the safe vehicle parking pull-off or the pedestrian viewpoint, rather than an inaccessible offshore reef or private tower foundation.
- Location name: The standardized Icelandic name alongside its common English transliteration (such as Garðskagaviti / Gardskagi Lighthouse).
- Category marker: Tagged specifically under our lighthouse directory so your mapping app can filter or display custom icons.
- Seasonal window: Clear seasonal applicability notes highlighting winter road accessibility, snowpack considerations, or summer nesting closures.
- Access brief: Sourced information covering turn-offs from numbered highways, track conditions, and footpaths.
It is equally important to understand what a waypoint is not. A waypoint is not an active route, it does not calculate turn-by-turn driving instructions, and it is not a live data feed. The files contain geographic landmarks that you overlay onto whichever offline mapping engine you prefer to run on your phone, tablet, or dedicated navigation unit.
We offer four distinct category maps priced at $14 each: Landscape map (62 GPS viewpoints), Waterfall, Lighthouse map, and Church. Because the four single-category maps sum to $56, the more practical option for a comprehensive self-drive tour is the Complete Iceland Photo Map. At $29, the Complete map covers all 121 field-checked locations across the island, as verified in our published product specifications. If you want every coastal viewpoint, mountain turn-off, and falls in a unified dataset, you can explore the Complete Iceland Photo Map package before mapping your drive.
If you prefer to verify file handling on your hardware before committing, the free sample at /sample is five real waypoints from the catalog, in the same format as the paid files, as one GPX file. No account, no expiry, nothing to install; leaving an email is optional.
Why Lighthouse Coordinates Beat Lighthouse Names When You Are Driving
Searching for coastal lighthouses by name while driving in rural Iceland routinely leads to routing errors. Icelandic place names rely on specific characters (such as ð, þ, and æ) and standard compound suffixes. The Icelandic word for lighthouse is viti, which is appended directly to regional headlands, farms, or coastal features. In commercial search engines, inconsistent transliterations—such as switching between "Gardskagi", "Gardur", and "Garðskagaviti"—frequently confuse routing databases.
A text search in standard consumer navigation apps can easily snap your destination pin to the geographic centroid of a parish, a private farm track bearing the same ancestral name, or an opposite shoreline across an impassable fjord. A raw coordinate pair completely bypasses linguistic processing: it resolves to an unalterable point on the surface of the earth regardless of system language, local keyboard settings, or carrier connectivity.
The final approach to an Icelandic coastal light rarely follows a paved highway. While primary segments like Route 1 (the Ring Road), Route 41 on the Reykjanes peninsula, or Route 54 on Snæfellsnes feature smooth asphalt, the final one to three kilometers leading to a headland typically deteriorate into washboard gravel, packed sand, or private access roads with cattle grids. A waypoint positioned directly at the designated parking area prevents you from accidentally turning down an agricultural easement or driving onto fragile, protected coastal dunes.
The files carry season and access notes, not live conditions. Check vedur.is and road.is for current weather and road status. Consult official travel advisories at SafeTravel Iceland, the meteorological service at vedur.is, and the road authority at road.is before heading onto unpaved tracks. Winter drifts, high spring tides, and gravel erosion can alter track conditions overnight. The access notes inside our dataset describe the typical road grade and foot approach, but local road management authorities dictate actual access on any given day.
A common mistake during photo route planning is assuming that because a headland beacon is visible across a bay from a numbered road, it is easily reachable with heavy camera gear. Many coastal lights stand atop sheer sea stacks or require traversing private grazing land with strict boundary fences. To decide whether a coastal detour justifies 45 to 90 minutes of your shooting schedule, apply this simple decision rule:
- Check whether the final track requires a modified 4x4 or allows standard two-wheel-drive passenger cars.
- Confirm the walking distance from the vehicle parking coordinates to the composition ledge (under 500 meters versus multi-kilometer coastal hikes).
- Identify the orientation of the lantern room relative to prevailing Atlantic weather systems to avoid shooting directly into driving coastal mist.
Photographing Lighthouses in Iceland: Light, Weather and Composition
When photographing lighthouses in iceland, the primary technical challenge is balancing changing atmospheric conditions against a fixed architectural subject. Unlike dynamic subjects that require constant repositioning, a lighthouse gives you a permanent focal point. The photographic quality of the frame depends entirely on marine light, cloud structures, and wind stability.
Seasonal Light Windows and Sun Trajectories
Iceland's subarctic latitude (roughly 63° to 66° North) produces extreme seasonal variance in solar elevation and golden hour duration:
- Summer Solstice (June to mid-July): True night does not occur. The sun skirts the northern horizon, providing continuous golden hour and civil twilight conditions that can last for hours. This window allows you to shoot northern and western headlands—such as those on the Westfjords or Snæfellsnes—under directional, low-angle light past midnight without encountering other visitors.
- Equinoxes (March and September): Light cycles behave more predictably, with standard 12-hour distributions. These shoulder months deliver long blue hours with gradual color gradients across the sea, providing the soft sky illumination needed to balance against illuminated lantern rooms.
- Winter (November to February): The sun peaks only a few degrees above the horizon for four to five hours per day, casting continuous golden-red raking light across southern coasts. However, sub-zero winds and icing on coastal ledges require extreme caution.
Managing High Coastal Winds
Exposed promontories concentrate ocean gales. A tripod setup that remains rigid in an inland valley can vibrate violently on a headland cliff, ruining long exposures. To keep your frames sharp:
- Avoid extending the center column of your tripod under any circumstances on open headlands.
- Keep leg extensions as thick as possible; use two sections rather than three or four if eye-level height is not critical to the composition.
- Hang your camera pack from the tripod canopy hook to lower the center of gravity, ensuring the bag rests firmly on the turf to avoid acting as a wind pendulum.
- Use a hard-wired remote shutter release or a two-second exposure delay to eliminate vibration from your hands.
Salt Spray and Lens Care
Breaking ocean swells against sea cliffs throw atomized saltwater hundreds of yards inland. Salt spray leaves an oily, hygroscopic film on optical glass that causes hazy halation around highlights and destroys micro-contrast. Keep your lens cap on until your composition is framed. Carry several fresh, dry microfiber cloths in sealed plastic bags—once a cloth absorbs salt moisture, it will smear every glass surface it touches. Fit an optically flat multi-coated UV or clear protection filter over your front element so ocean grit can be wiped away without abrading prime glass coatings.
Composition and Visual Scale
Icelandic lighthouses range from squat, square concrete towers painted bright safety-orange (like many regional beacons on the north and east coasts) to slender, cylindrical white towers like those at Garðskagi. Because the surrounding coastal plains and volcanic flats are often barren, isolating the lighthouse as a solitary element can make the landscape appear flat and scale-less.
Incorporate foreground textures—such as basalt columns, jagged sea stacks, stranded driftwood, or breaking surf—to establish depth. Pay close attention to the horizon line: wide-angle lenses tilted up or down introduce barrel and perspective distortion that can pitch the lighthouse tower unnaturally. Level your sensor using the in-camera electronic horizon indicator, and consider a slightly longer focal length (35mm to 85mm) from farther back to compress the distance between the tower and the breaking waves behind it.
When working at night under active auroras, treat the lighthouse as a grounded architectural anchor. Aurora displays move quickly across northern skies; keep exposures between 4 and 8 seconds at ISO 1600 to 3200 to retain fine curtain definition, using a wide aperture (f/1.8 to f/2.8) so the lantern structure stays sharply rendered against the dynamic green arcs.
Pre-Shoot Field Checklist
- Forecast: Check cloud cover altitude and ground wind gusts on vedur.is before leaving base.
- Tides: Confirm whether the foreground shoreline or sea-stack approach is cut off by rising tides.
- Optics: Pre-clean front elements, pack clean microfibers, and check lens hoods for firm mounting.
- Stability: Clear loose gravel under rubber tripod feet before planting them into turf or rock.
Lighthouse GPS Locations in Iceland: How the Waypoints Are Organised
The lighthouse gps locations iceland catalog in our dataset is structured to let you quickly find shooting locations along the specific stretch of coast you are navigating. Inside the GPX and KML files, locations are tagged systematically so modern navigation apps can filter them by category, region, and practical operating season.
Transparency regarding our data structure is central to how we publish. Every location carries coordinates, category and season. 9 of the 121 locations carry written field notes today. 112 of the 121 locations carry a researched brief compiled from published sources, each listing its sources. The briefs ship inside the paid KML, GPX and GeoJSON files as a section headed "Background (from published sources, not a field visit)". These are distinct from the 9 locations with written field notes.
We do not lock coordinate points behind paywalls or pretend public geographic features are trade secrets. The coordinates are published as an open CC-BY dataset at /dataset. What is sold is the curation, the formats and the season and access notes — not secrecy. You are purchasing verified parking offsets, structured metadata fields, clean conversions into universally accepted GIS standards, and verified access paths that save you hours of manual satellite scouting.
To use these points effectively during pre-trip planning in 2026, sort the catalog by region (South Coast, Reykjanes, Snæfellsnes, Westfjords, North, Eastfjords) and match them against your daily drive legs. By reviewing the seasonal tags, you can instantly eliminate coastal paths that become impassable during winter storms or muddy spring thaws, leaving you with a clean, field-ready shortlist.
Loading the File: Import Paths for Each App You Might Use
Different mobile operating systems and navigation apps handle spatial data through distinct workflows.
Google Maps on iPhone
Read our detailed guide for importing into Google Maps on iPhone to understand this workflow and its offline limitations.
Organic Maps
Organic Maps is an open-source, privacy-focused offline mapping tool built directly on OpenStreetMap data. It natively reads KML and KMZ formats with zero setup. You simply transfer the file to your mobile device (via AirDrop, email attachment, or local download) and select Organic Maps to open it. Check our walkthrough for Organic Maps import steps to get clean offline pins.
OsmAnd
OsmAnd provides extensive control over offline vector maps, contour lines, and GPX layers. It is ideal for photographers who want to toggle specific categories on and off or overlay hillshade layers.
Garmin Handhelds and In-Dash Units
Dedicated GPS receivers like Garmin GPSMAP handhelds or Drive-series in-car units require standard GPX files placed inside the device's internal storage directory. Plug your Garmin device into a computer via USB and transfer the GPX file directly to the /Garmin/GPX folder, or load it via Garmin BaseCamp. See our comprehensive guide for Garmin offline GPX installation.
Gaia GPS
Gaia GPS handles both GPX and KML files via its web portal and mobile app, offering deep offline layering over satellite imagery and topo sheets. Uploading our KML file preserves custom folder structures and detailed notes. For the exact procedure, review our instructions on Gaia GPS KML setup.
Locus Map and Google Earth
If you prefer to scout headland topography, cliff drops, and sunrise angles on a desktop 3D globe before your trip, open the KML file inside Google Earth Pro following our walkthrough at Google Earth desktop scouting.
Our practical advice is to download the files onto a computer at home, extract the ZIP container, transfer the files to your phone or GPS unit, and verify that all markers appear on your offline maps before boarding your flight. Do not wait until you land at Keflavík Airport to troubleshoot mobile app file permissions.
If the file does not load on your device, email within 30 days and we either get it working or refund you.
Building a Lighthouse Route Around the Rest of Your Trip
Few photographers travel to Iceland exclusively to shoot lighthouses. Coastal beacons are most effective as visual anchors integrated into broader landscape itineraries, offering dramatic compositions when inland mountain tracks are closed or waterfalls are crowded with day visitors.
By cross-referencing coastal lights with our Landscape map and Lighthouse map, you can construct efficient daily shooting loops that prevent backtracking. For example, explore our detailed location breakdown for Garðskagi Lighthouse to see how parking offsets, tower histories, and shoreline angles are organized in our catalog entries.
Vehicle Choice and Access Tradeoffs
Your rental vehicle dictates which coastal spurs you can safely explore:
- Standard 2WD Passenger Cars: Suitable for well-maintained paved roads and hard-packed gravel paths leading to primary coastal lights like Garðskagi, Akranes, or Malarrif. They should not be driven on soft sand tracks, coastal mud flats, or roads marked with an "F" prefix.
- 4x4 Campers and SUVs: Essential for accessing remote lighthouses in the Westfjords, parts of the Vatnsnes peninsula, or exposed headlands in the northeast where ruts, loose gravel, and deep potholes can ground a standard low-clearance chassis.
Remember that overnight parking laws in Iceland strictly prohibit wild camping. Campers and vans must stay overnight in designated registered campsites. Having access notes in your GPS file helps you time your dusk shoot at a remote light and calculate the transit time back to a legal campground before late-night fatigue sets in.
Worked Example: A Two-Day Southern Coastal Segment
Here is an efficient, real-world example of how to incorporate coastal lighthouses into a two-day southern photography loop without compromising your primary landscape shoots:
Day 1: Reykjanes Peninsula to Selfoss
- 08:00 – 11:00: Arrive at Keflavík, pick up vehicle, drive past Sandgerði to the northern tip of Reykjanes at Garðskagi. Park at the designated seaside area (64.0820° N, 22.6908° W). Shoot both the historic 1897 red-banded low tower (64.0818° N, 22.6917° W) and the 1944 tall tower (64.0825° N, 22.6903° W) against incoming North Atlantic swells.
- 12:00 – 15:00: Follow Route 425 south toward Reykjanestá to view the coastal sea cliffs of Valahnúkamöl and Reykjanesviti (parking at 63.8122° N, 22.7130° W; beacon perched atop the volcanic mound at 63.8153° N, 22.7093° W).
- 16:00 – 19:30: Cut east across Route 427 through Grindavík toward Selfoss, setting up for sunset light over coastal moss fields and volcanic plains.
Day 2: Dyrhólaey and the Southern Headlands
- 07:30 – 10:30: Drive Route 1 east past Skógar toward the coastal promontory of Dyrhólaey. Turn onto Route 218 to reach the upper headland parking coordinates (63.3996° N, 19.1287° W).
- 10:30 – 13:30: Photograph the castle-like 1927 Dyrhólaey lighthouse (63.3993° N, 19.1283° W) perched above black sand beaches, framing the basalt sea arch below and Reynisdrangar sea stacks to the east.
- 14:00 – Sunset: Continue eastward toward Vík í Mýrdal for late afternoon compositions along the black beaches and church ridges.