🇮🇸 Iceland · North and east
Akureyri is Iceland's 'capital of the north': a small, charming town of barely 19,000 people, looking out over the head of Eyjafjörður, the longest fjord in the country, and ringed by mountains that wake up snow-covered most of the year. Despite its size, it is the major urban centre outside Reykjavík, with a university, a theatre, breweries, cafés, a working harbour and a warmth that surprises anyone arriving from the empty landscapes of the interior. It is also the perfect base for discovering one of the most astonishing corners of the island.
The town has details that make it unforgettable. On a hill stands Akureyrarkirkja, the Lutheran church designed by Guðjón Samúelsson, the same architect behind Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík. A few steps away grows the northernmost botanical garden in the world, with thousands of species flowering against all odds almost within reach of the Arctic. And right in the centre, the traffic lights turn red in the shape of a heart: they were installed after the 2008 financial crisis to lift people's spirits, and became a symbol of the town.
This guide covers the best of Akureyri and its surroundings in a practical, friendly way: what to see in town, how to head out into the fjord to watch whales, how the geothermal pools work (with their strict rule about showering naked before getting in), where to ski, where to try Icelandic beer, and how to use Akureyri as the gateway to Lake Mývatn, Goðafoss, Dettifoss and the whole north. All with real prices in Icelandic krónur, because Iceland is extremely expensive and it is best to know that in advance.
According to the Landnámabók (the Book of Settlements), the Eyjafjörður area was settled around the year 890 by Helgi the Lean (Helgi magri), a Viking of mixed Norwegian and Irish upbringing who combined the worship of Thor with Christianity. For centuries, however, there was nothing here but scattered farms. Only with the Danish trade monopoly, imposed in 1602, did the small harbour begin to carry weight as a trading point. Akureyri was granted status as a trading town in 1786, lost it in 1836 and regained it in 1862. The real take-off came with fish: first herring, whose shoals drew Norwegian capital from the late nineteenth century, and then cod, which industrialised the town. During the Second World War, Allied troops used Akureyri as an air base in the North Atlantic. In 1987 the University of Akureyri was founded, cementing the town as the educational and scientific hub of the north. And in 2008, after the brutal financial crisis that hit Iceland, the town put red hearts in its traffic lights to lift spirits: today they are its best-loved emblem. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Akureyri, the capital of the north; the volcanism of Lake Mývatn and the Krafla Fires; Húsavík, the whale capital, caught between whale watching and the hunting Iceland still allows; and Seyðisfjörður, the eastern fjord where the telegraph cable that connected the island to the world came ashore in 1906.
Read the history of North and east →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Akureyri begins, as almost everything in Iceland does, in the sagas and in the Landnámabók, the Book of Settlements, which records who the island's first settlers were and where they set up. According to that source, the Eyjafjörður region — the longest fjord in the country, at whose head the town stands today — was settled around the year 890 by a figure with a memorable name: Helgi the Lean (Helgi magri Eyvindarson), a Viking raised between Norway and Ireland, son of a Norwegian father and a mother of Gaelic stock.
Helgi is a fascinating figure because he embodies the cultural mix of the Norse settlement of the North Atlantic. He is said to have been raised Christian, but to have gone on invoking Thor, the pagan god of thunder, when times were hard: a foot in each world, like so many settlers of the period. Tradition has it that on reaching the fjord he threw the carved pillars of his old high seat into the sea — a custom for letting the gods choose the site of the home — and founded his farm at Kristnes, 'Christ's headland', a few kilometres from present-day Akureyri. From there he distributed land among his followers and relatives, populating the valley.
For almost eight hundred years, however, on the exact site of the future town there was nothing but a sandbank and a few scattered farms. The name itself says so: 'Akureyri' means, roughly, 'the sandbank of the field' or 'the spit of sand beside the cornfield' (akur, cultivated field; eyri, sandbank or spit beside the water). It was a corner with good anchorage, sheltered from Atlantic winds by the mountains of the fjord, but throughout the Icelandic Middle Ages the north lived on livestock, coastal fishing and subsistence farming, with no towns or villages in the European sense. Iceland as a whole was, well into the modern era, a country of farms without a single city.
Akureyri's destiny as a place of trade was tied, paradoxically, to one of the harshest chapters in Icelandic history: the Danish trade monopoly. From the late Middle Ages, Iceland had passed into the orbit of the Norwegian crown and then, through the union of the Scandinavian kingdoms, into Denmark's. In 1602 the Danish king imposed a trade monopoly that reserved all the island's commerce for authorised Danish merchants and divided the country into districts with fixed ports. Akureyri's good anchorage, at the head of Eyjafjörður, was designated one of those official trading posts.
The monopoly was, for Iceland, a period of economic suffocation: prices were set by the Danes, imports and exports were controlled and the best profits went to Copenhagen. But at the same time, the existence of a fixed trading port planted the seed of the future urban settlement. A few merchant houses belonging to Danish traders began to appear around the trading site, and Akureyri began, very gradually, to be something more than farms.
In 1786, when Denmark finally lifted the monopoly and sought to stimulate urban development on the island, King Christian VII granted Akureyri — along with Reykjavík and other places — the status of trading town (kaupstaður). On paper, that was the birth of the town. In practice, Akureyri was still a handful of houses: the experiment did not take off immediately and the town lost its municipal status in 1836. Only in 1862 did it regain it for good, this time on a base of real growth. Over the nineteenth century, Akureyri also became one of the centres of the cooperative movement and of the struggle to shake off Danish commercial tutelage: the founding of local trading societies, such as Gránufélagið, allowed the people of the north to handle their own resources and accumulate capital, a decisive step towards the economic autonomy that would later accompany Iceland's political independence.
What really turned Akureyri from a village into a town was the sea, and fish in particular. In the late nineteenth century, the shoals of herring that came close to the northern coasts of Iceland in summer stirred the greed and initiative of Norwegian fishermen, who from the 1860s began setting up in Eyjafjörður to exploit that 'silver gold'. When the people of Akureyri saw the money that could be made from herring, the town started moving: quays, salting stations and the first industries went up.
The decisive push came in the twentieth century. In 1927 a herring processing plant opened that marked the start of the town's modern industrialisation and the rapid development of the fishing sector. Cod, the historical basis of the Icelandic economy, joined the herring, and with the fish came shipyards, canneries, cooperatives and an urban working class. Akureyri established itself as the great industrial, commercial and service centre of the north, a counterweight to Reykjavík's overwhelming weight in the south.
That fishing prosperity had its fragile side: herring is a capricious resource, and in the late 1960s the shoals virtually disappeared from Icelandic waters through overfishing and oceanographic change, causing a crisis across the north. But by then Akureyri already had a more diversified economy, with industry, trade, administration and services, and it kept growing. The town also developed a cultural life remarkable for its size: theatre, choral music, publishing and a proud identity as 'capital of the north', at times in cheeky rivalry with the distant capital in the south.
The Second World War changed Iceland profoundly, and Akureyri was not left out. After Nazi Germany occupied Denmark in 1940, and fearing that strategically placed Iceland would fall into German hands, the United Kingdom occupied the island in May 1940, and the following year the United States took over. Akureyri, because of its position in the north and its harbour, had a military role: it was one of the air bases used by No. 330 Squadron of the Royal Norwegian Air Force (part of the RAF), which flew seaplanes — among them the Northrop N-3PB and, later, the Catalina — to protect the convoys crossing the North Atlantic towards Britain and Murmansk, in the Soviet Union, from German submarines.
The Allied presence, with its money, its technology and its infrastructure, sped up the modernisation of the whole of Iceland, and the north was no exception. In the middle of the war, on 17 June 1944, Iceland proclaimed the Republic and became definitively independent from Denmark. In the post-war decades, Akureyri grew as a modern town, with new neighbourhoods, services, a regional hospital and an economy leaning more and more on industry, trade, education and fledgling tourism.
A key milestone in that coming of age was the founding of the University of Akureyri in 1987. It started modestly — barely a few dozen students and two faculties — but with an enormous ambition: to decentralise Icelandic higher education, too concentrated in Reykjavík, and give the north an engine of knowledge of its own. Over the years the university expanded to numerous faculties and thousands of students, with a strong emphasis on nursing, marine science, education and Arctic studies, and turned Akureyri into a genuine academic and scientific hub. The university rejuvenated the town, attracted professionals and helped keep people in the north, offsetting the historical pull of the capital.
In October 2008, Iceland staged one of the most spectacular financial collapses in recent history. The country's three big banks, which over the previous decade had grown out of all proportion by leveraging international debt, went under almost simultaneously. The Icelandic króna collapsed, inflation shot up, many families were left with foreign-currency debt and the whole country fell into a brutal recession and crisis of confidence. It was a national trauma: there were mass protests outside Parliament in Reykjavík — the so-called 'pots and pans revolution' — and a widespread feeling of dejection and betrayal.
Akureyri, like the rest of Iceland, took the blow. And it was in that bleak context that the gesture the town is now known for worldwide appeared: the red hearts in the traffic lights. In 2008, as part of a redesign of the local summer festival to make it more family-friendly, the town decided to change the red light in its traffic signals for a heart-shaped one. The idea, as the mayor of the time, Eiríkur Björn Björgvinsson, later explained, was simple and human: in the middle of the crisis, to remind people of 'what really matters' and give them a small reason to smile when stopping in the street.
The gesture struck a chord. The hearts were so popular — with residents and visitors alike — that they stopped being temporary and became a permanent feature of Akureyri, ending up as its best-loved and most photographed symbol, an emblem of warmth and resilience. Iceland, for its part, recovered from the crisis remarkably quickly over the following decade, largely thanks to a tourism industry that exploded and transformed the country. Today Akureyri is a prosperous, lively town, the largest outside the capital's metropolitan area, with a university, a fishing industry, services and growing tourism that uses it as a base for discovering the north: Lake Mývatn, the Goðafoss and Dettifoss waterfalls, the whales of Eyjafjörður and Húsavík. A small town at the head of an Arctic fjord that, after centuries of farms, monopolies, herring and crisis, learned to welcome the world with a red heart glowing in every traffic light.