🇮🇸 Europe
A land of ice and fire: volcanoes, glaciers, waterfalls, geysers and northern lights in a landscape that looks like another planet.
Iceland is a young volcanic island, still under construction, sitting right on top of the rift where the American and Eurasian plates pull apart. That explains everything you are going to see: the geysers, the fields of freshly hardened lava, the thermal water that comes out of the ground boiling and the volcanoes that still erupt every so often. At the same time it has glaciers covering a tenth of its territory and waterfalls everywhere. It is, literally, ice and fire in the same landscape.
The country is the size of a third of Uruguay but has fewer than four hundred thousand inhabitants, and two thirds of them live in the Reykjavík area. The rest is a ring road — the Ring Road — that loops all the way around the island, past villages of two hundred people, fjords, black beaches and glaciers that come almost down to the sea. There is no railway and virtually no public transport outside the southwest, so the trip is done by car and that is how it is meant to be done.
Two things to accept before you book. The first is the cost: Iceland is one of the most expensive countries in the world and there is no way to dodge that completely. The second is the weather, which is not a detail but the factor in charge: wind is the dominant force, roads close with no warning, and checking the forecast every day is not guidebook hyperbole but what any Icelander does before leaving the house.
The local currency is the Icelandic króna (ISK). Carry some cash, tell your bank before you travel and check the day's exchange rate.
Full converter for ISK →Every international flight lands at Keflavík (KEF), about fifty kilometres from Reykjavík, and you get into the city on the Flybus or Airport Direct coaches in roughly forty-five minutes. Iceland has no railway. You travel the country on the ring road, the Ring Road, by car or campervan, and that is how the trip is designed; the Straeto buses exist but run minimal frequencies and all but vanish in winter. The F-roads of the interior require a 4x4 and only open in summer. The most important thing: the weather closes roads with no warning, so check umferdin.is every single day for road conditions and vedur.is for the forecast and wind alerts.
Summer, June to August, is the season for travelling around: every road is open, including the ones in the interior, there is daylight almost twenty-four hours a day — in June it barely gets dark — and you can drive the whole Ring Road without drama. It is also when the whales and puffins are there, and when every tour runs. The downside is that it is the most expensive and most crowded season, and you cannot see the northern lights because there is no night. May and September are good middle grounds, with fewer people and slightly better prices.
Winter, October to March, is a different trip: northern lights, blue ice caves — which only exist at this time of year — and snowy landscapes, with lower accommodation prices. But you have to accept its rules: few hours of daylight, barely four or five in the depths of December, many roads in the north and the interior closed, storms that leave people stranded for a whole day and driving on ice that is not for everyone. If it is your first time and you want to do the full loop of the island, summer is the answer; if the goal is the aurora, winter with a fixed base in the south.
Icelandic cooking came out of preserving food on an island with no trees and no crops, and that is where its most famous dishes come from. Icelandic lamb, raised loose in the mountains, is excellent and turns up in plokkfiskur — a fish and potato stew — and in soups. The fish is first rate, especially cod and herring. Skyr, technically a fresh cheese even though it looks like thick yoghurt, is eaten at breakfast and taken home as a souvenir. And there is rye bread baked underground with geothermal heat, served with butter and smoked fish.
There are also the foods put on display as a challenge to tourists — fermented shark, sheep's head — that almost no Icelander eats regularly; trying them is an anecdote, not a culinary experience. What you should try is pylsur, the Icelandic hot dog made with lamb, pork and beef, ordered 'with everything', the national street food and one of the few cheap things in the country. Two facts that save real money: the tap water is among the best in the world and buying bottled water makes no sense; and alcohol is only sold in the state-run Vínbúðin shops, with limited hours and very high prices, so if you plan to drink, buy at the airport duty free on arrival, which is what locals do.
Iceland is one of the safest countries in the world: crime is practically non-existent and you can walk at night without a thought. All the risk on this trip is nature, and there you do need to take it seriously because tourists have accidents every year. The waves at Reynisfjara beach come up with no warning and take people. Geothermal fields have mud at over a hundred degrees right beside the path. Glaciers have crevasses covered by snow and you do not set foot on them without a guide and without gear. And the wind can rip the car door out of your hands, which is one of the most frequent insurance claims.
The rule Icelanders repeat to each other is simple: check the forecast before you head out, every day. The two official sites are umferdin.is, which shows the condition and closure of every stretch of road, and vedur.is, run by the meteorological service, with wind and storm alerts; safetravel.is is the official safety site for travellers and lets you file your travel plan. If a sign says the road is closed, it is closed: driving on anyway is a fine and, above all, it is how rescues happen. Driving off marked roads is banned and heavily penalised, because broken moss takes decades to grow back. The health system is good and expensive without cover, so travel insurance is essential and should ideally cover rescue. Emergencies: 112.
Iceland is among the most expensive countries in the world and you have to plan with that in mind. As a rough guide, with no official source because none exists for these items, a dorm bed usually runs forty to seventy euros, a private room or guesthouse a hundred and twenty to two hundred, a main course in a restaurant thirty to forty-five euros and a beer ten to thirteen. Car hire and petrol are the other big expense, and the tours — glacier, ice caves, whales — each cost a fair amount.
There are four levers that genuinely work. Cooking: the Bónus and Krónan supermarkets are far cheaper than eating out, and almost every place to stay has a kitchen. Renting a campervan, which solves transport and accommodation in a single expense and is what a lot of people do in summer. Choosing your tours well: there are one or two worth every penny and the rest of the landscape you see from the road for free. And using the municipal geothermal pools in the towns, which cost a fraction of the Blue Lagoon and are where Icelanders gather. On top of that, the waterfalls, beaches, craters and viewpoints charge no admission, although in some places you do have to pay for parking.
Icelanders are informal and fairly direct, with very little hierarchy: they use first names even with the president, and in fact they do not use surnames as we know them but patronymics — Jón's son is Jónsson and his daughter Jónsdóttir — which is why the phone book is ordered by first name. There is an expression that sums up the national character quite well, þetta reddast, roughly 'it'll work out', and it explains a mix of calm and apparent improvisation that on an island with this weather is fairly reasonable.
Two very concrete customs worth knowing. In the geothermal pools and hot springs you are required to shower naked with soap before getting into the water, in communal changing rooms, and it is enforced: the water has little chlorine precisely because that prior hygiene is taken seriously, and skipping the rule is the fastest way to make a bad impression. And shoes come off when you enter a house, no exceptions. There is a very strong sensitivity about nature: stepping off the path, driving off-road or stacking stones in natural formations are considered real damage, not pranks, because in such a fragile ecosystem the marks last for decades.
The history of Iceland begins with geology. The island rises right on top of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the giant fissure where the North American and Eurasian plates slowly pull apart: that is why Iceland breathes fire and boiling water, why it has volcanoes, geysers and lava fields, and why it grows a few centimetres every year as the two halves of the country move away from each other. Nobody lived on that young land, still in the making, until barely eleven centuries ago. It was one of the last large habitable territories on the planet to be settled by human beings, and it happened all at once, in the lifetime of people who left their names written down.
Those first islanders — Norse settlers who arrived around the year 874, with perhaps an Irish monk or two before them — founded the Alþingi in 930, one of the oldest parliaments in the world, and created a republic of farmers with no king. And while they ploughed hard ground and fought between clans, they wrote the sagas: an extraordinary medieval literature with no equal in the Europe of its time. Then came the dark centuries — submission to Norway and to Denmark, the Black Death, the trade monopoly, the Laki eruption that killed a fifth of the population —, the struggle for independence won in 1944, the Cod Wars, the summit that almost did away with the world's nuclear weapons, a historic financial crash and, once again, the volcanoes: Eyjafjallajökull, which paralysed the skies over Europe, and the eruptions that since 2021 have forced an entire town to be evacuated. Travelling through Iceland is travelling through that history of fire, ice and words.
Read the full history of Iceland →Pick a region and open each destination to see what to do, prices and how to get there.
These are the sources we cite most across this country's guides, with how many times each appears. Hard data —tickets, opening hours, requirements, transport— comes from the official source and carries the date we checked it. Restaurant and hotel picks come from guides and reviews, and we say so on each page.
