ABSTRACT Social media has become a catalyst for tourism in nature-based destinations, raising management challenges to cope with abrupt visitation growth in sensitive settings. Access to location-based social media data provides valuable material to identify and monitor spatial distribution patterns in tourism visitation and longitudinal trends, especially in vast, remote settings. This paper aims to evaluate the use of Flickr geodata for mapping spatiotemporal dynamics of tourist behaviors in Iceland. The consistency of the Flickr dataset with other proxies supports its validity and relevance. Tourism visitation appears closely related with accessibility factors, which are characterized by a strong seasonal variation. On longer timescales, the data reflect the increase of off-season visitation and the emergence of new tourist sites. This study demonstrates the value and potential of such a dataset to get an overview of the spatial patterns and dynamics of tourism at a national-level and outlines the limits inherent to its use.