Pingvellir sits on the rift between the North American and European plates, just 23km east of Reykjavik. Although this rift stretches right across Iceland, nowhere else is it so expansively evident – a 4km wide, 40m deep slash in the landscape, sided in basalt columns and extending for 16km from Iceland’s largest lake Pingvallavatn to the low, rounded cone of Skjaldbreider volcano in the northeast.