Iceland is a fortunate geological accident. The island sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the enormous underwater mountain chain that runs the length of the Atlantic Ocean floor from north to south and marks the boundary between two tectonic plates: the North American to the west and the Eurasian to the east. Almost everywhere else on the planet that ridge lies submerged thousands of metres down; in Iceland, thanks to an especially hot "plume" of magma rising beneath the island (a hotspot similar to Hawaii's), the ridge emerges from the sea and is there in plain sight. That is why Iceland is one of the few places on Earth where you can walk, literally, along the rift between two continents.
The two plates separate at a rate of about two centimetres a year, and that gap is continuously filled with molten rock pushing up from below. The result is a young country, extremely active volcanically and permanently growing: much of western Iceland moves a few centimetres further from the eastern part every year, and the island's surface, in geological average, widens. Along that central fissure line up the volcanoes — there are more than thirty active volcanic systems —, the lava fields, the fumaroles, the geysers and the geothermal areas that give Iceland its otherworldly landscape.
That same underground heat, a source of catastrophe throughout history, is today the country's great asset: almost every Icelandic home is heated with geothermal water, and electricity comes almost entirely from renewable sources — hydro and geothermal. The very first part of the capital's name, Reykjavík, "bay of smokes", refers to the steam the first settlers saw rising from the ground. Fire and ice coexist in an unstable balance: glaciers covering volcanoes, rivers of lava beside tongues of ice. The whole human history of Iceland has been written on top of that trembling ground.
Before the Vikings there were, perhaps, monks. Medieval Icelandic sources such as the Íslendingabók (the "Book of Icelanders", by Ari Þorgilsson, around 1130) and Irish accounts say that when the first Norsemen arrived they found traces of Irish Christian hermits they called papar: bells, croziers and abandoned books. These monks, heirs to the Celtic monastic tradition that sought out deserted islands for spiritual retreat, are thought to have used Iceland as a refuge of solitude in the eighth and ninth centuries, and to have left when they saw the pagans coming. Archaeology has not confirmed their presence with any certainty, and the matter is still debated, but several place names — such as the Vestmann islands or the term Papey itself — keep their memory alive.
The permanent, large-scale settlement, on the other hand, is well documented. According to tradition, the first permanent settler was the Norwegian chieftain Ingólfur Arnarson, who is said to have arrived around the year 874. The Landnámabók (the "Book of Settlements") tells how, on sighting the coast, Ingólfur threw the wooden pillars of his high seat into the sea, swearing to settle wherever the waves carried them; he found them in a bay in the southwest with geothermal steam rising from it, and so he called it Reykjavík. The dating is remarkable: studies of volcanic ash layers (tephrochronology) place a major ashfall at around 871-872, just below the oldest human remains, confirming that settlement really did begin in those years.
The so-called "Settlement Age" (landnám) ran roughly between 874 and 930, and in barely half a century the country was occupied. Most arrivals were Norwegians fleeing the growing power of King Harald Fairhair, along with slaves and settlers of Celtic origin — Irish and Scottish — something modern genetic studies confirm: a large share of the female ancestry of today's Icelanders comes from the British Isles. Those settlers brought livestock, the Old Norse language — from which modern Icelandic, remarkably conservative, descends — and a way of organising themselves without a king that would shape the country's course.
In the year 930, the chieftains who had divided the island between them took an extraordinary step: instead of crowning a king, they founded a common assembly. On the plain of Þingvellir — a place of enormous symbolic force, right where the rift between the tectonic plates opens a valley of lava cliffs — the Alþingi, the general assembly of all Iceland, met for the first time. It is considered one of the oldest parliaments in the world still in existence. Every summer, for two weeks, the goðar (the chieftain-priests who combined political and religious power) and the free men came to Þingvellir to pass and amend laws, settle disputes, close deals and marriages, and listen to the lögsögumaður, the "law speaker", who had to recite a third of the legal code from memory each year from the Law Rock.
So was born the Commonwealth or Icelandic Free State (Þjóðveldið), which lasted from 930 until 1262. It was a singular political experiment: a country with no king, no army and almost no central government, held together by a network of goðorð — the chieftaincies — and by a sophisticated body of law with no real executive power to enforce it. Justice depended in the last instance on the parties accepting the verdict or having the strength to impose it, which made alliances, negotiation and revenge the true engines of social life.
For much of those three centuries, the Commonwealth flourished notably. The society of independent farmers prospered, converted to Christianity peacefully in the year 1000, and developed an intense cultural life that would culminate in the writing of the sagas. But the very design that made it original — the lack of a central power able to impose order — carried the seed of its crisis: when a few powerful families accumulated too many chieftaincies, the balance broke and the country slid into civil war.
Medieval Iceland's most astonishing contribution was neither military nor political, but literary. Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, in a poor, remote country of barely a few tens of thousands of people who raised sheep and fished, a body of narrative prose was written that has no parallel anywhere in the Europe of its time: the sagas. Written in the vernacular — not in Latin —, in a spare, realistic and surprisingly modern style, the sagas tell stories of families, feuds, voyages, revenge and law with an economy of means and a psychological depth that still fascinate readers.
There are several large groups. The Íslendingasögur or "sagas of Icelanders" — such as Njál's Saga, Egil's Saga or the Saga of the People of Laxárdalur — recount the lives of the families of the settlement period and the Commonwealth, set in the real landscape of the country's fjords and valleys. The kings' sagas, like Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, tell the history of the Norwegian monarchs. The legendary sagas and the eddas — the Poetic Edda and Snorri's own Prose Edda — preserve much of what we know today about Norse mythology: Odin, Thor, Ragnarök and their whole universe of gods would have reached us far poorer without these Icelandic manuscripts.
The value of the sagas is twofold. On one hand they are first-rate literature, with complex heroes, powerful women and a tragic sense of fate and honour. On the other they are an irreplaceable historical and anthropological source: thanks to them we know the society, the law, the geography and even the daily life of medieval Scandinavia. That such a body of work should have come from the hands of farmers, on calfskin parchment stitched together by the fire during the long winters, is one of the great cultural puzzles of history. Icelanders kept those manuscripts as their greatest treasure, and their repatriation from Denmark in 1971 was experienced as a national celebration.
Around the year 1000, Iceland came close to a war of religion. King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway was pressing hard for the Icelanders to abandon paganism, and at the Alþingi the community split into two camps, pagan and Christian, to the point where people feared the country would break apart. The solution was typically Icelandic: instead of taking up arms, both sides agreed to submit to the arbitration of a single man, the lögsögumaður Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði, who — as the Íslendingabók tells it — was himself a pagan. Þorgeir spent a day and a night lying under a fur cloak, meditating in silence, and the next day ruled that all Icelanders must be baptised, though worship of the old gods in private, the eating of horsemeat and the exposure of unwanted newborns would be tolerated. Iceland became Christian without bloodshed, by decision of an assembly.
At almost the same time, those same Norsemen were pulling off one of the great feats of human exploration. From Iceland, Erik the Red had colonised Greenland around 985; and from Greenland, his son Leif Erikson sailed west around the year 1000 and reached a land he called Vinland: the coast of North America, some five centuries before Christopher Columbus. For a long time this was only a story from the Vinland sagas, taken to be legend.
Today it is an archaeologically confirmed fact. In the 1960s, the excavation of the site at L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland (Canada), brought to light the unmistakable remains of a Norse settlement — turf houses, a forge, Scandinavian objects —, the first material proof of a European presence in America before Columbus. The site is now a World Heritage Site. It was not a lasting colony — the Norsemen withdrew in the face of the distance and conflict with the indigenous peoples, whom they called skrælingjar — but it shows that, from their small island in the North Atlantic, Icelanders and Greenlanders touched America long before anyone in the Mediterranean imagined it existed.
The Commonwealth system rested on a balance of power between many goðar. Over the course of the thirteenth century that balance broke down: a few powerful families — the Sturlungar, the Ásbirningar, the Haukdælir, among others — accumulated chieftaincies and territory until they became true lords fighting for control of the island. The period, known as the Age of the Sturlungs (Sturlungaöld), was a bloody and prolonged civil war, with battles, massacres and betrayals that left the country exhausted. Paradoxically, those same years of violence coincide with the great flowering of saga writing: much of it was composed just as the world it described was collapsing. The Sturlunga saga itself, written by witnesses to that bloodletting, is the chronicle of that self-destruction.
King Haakon IV of Norway knew how to exploit the chaos. One of the great figures of the period, the historian and politician Snorri Sturluson — author of the Heimskringla and the Prose Edda —, had been a courtier of the Norwegian king, and ended up murdered in 1241 in the cellar of his farm at Reykholt, on the crown's indirect orders. Worn down by decades of war, and under pressure from Norway, the Icelandic chieftains and assemblies accepted the king's authority district by district.
Between 1262 and 1264 the Alþingi ratified the so-called Gamli sáttmáli, the "Old Covenant", by which Iceland recognised the sovereignty of the king of Norway in exchange for certain guarantees — the keeping of the peace, the regular sending of supply ships and respect for local laws. More than three centuries of independence came to an end. In 1271 and 1281 the crown introduced new legal codes on the Norwegian model (Járnsíða and Jónsbók), and power passed to royal officials. Iceland was entering a long stretch of foreign dependence it would not leave until the twentieth century.
The centuries that followed were hard. In 1397 the Kalmar Union brought Denmark, Norway and Sweden under a single crown, and along with Norway, Iceland effectively passed into the Danish orbit, where it would remain for more than five centuries. The island, distant and thinly populated, became a marginal possession whose fate was decided in Copenhagen. On top of that political dependence came the catastrophes: although the Black Death did not reach Iceland in the great European wave of the mid fourteenth century, it did strike with enormous violence in two later episodes, around 1402-1404 and again around 1494-1495, which may have killed half the population each time and disrupted life in the country for generations.
The sixteenth century brought the Protestant Reformation, and in Iceland it was not a conversion but an imposition. King Christian III of Denmark decided to impose Lutheranism across all his dominions, above all in order to seize the rich properties of the Catholic Church. The resistance had a face: Jón Arason, Catholic bishop of Hólar in the north, a poet and the last great defender of the old faith and of a certain Icelandic autonomy against the crown. He took up arms against the Lutheran advance, but was captured and beheaded together with two of his sons at Skálholt on 7 November 1550.
His execution marked the definitive triumph of the Reformation and of Danish power. The crown confiscated church property, the monasteries were closed and the Lutheran Church was placed under the king. The Bible was translated into Icelandic in 1584 — which, unintentionally, helped preserve the language —, but the country lost much of its monastic cultural life and sank still deeper into poverty and dependence. Jón Arason remained in memory as an almost tragic figure: the last Icelander to resist with arms before three centuries of subjection.
In 1602 the Danish crown imposed a trade monopoly on Iceland: only authorised Danish merchants, and only from designated ports, could buy and sell on the island. The system, which lasted in various forms until 1787, condemned Icelanders to sell their fish and wool at prices set by others and to buy flour, timber and tools dear and of poor quality. Barred from trading with the English or the Dutch, who often offered better terms, the country was trapped in a subsistence economy and chronic misery; bad winters translated directly into famine. The monopoly is remembered as one of the great grievances of Danish rule.
On that impoverished population fell, in 1783, the greatest catastrophe in Icelandic history. On 8 June the Lakagígar began to open, a volcanic fissure some 27 kilometres long in the south of the island, in the largest fissure lava eruption recorded in historical times. For eight months, until February 1784, Laki poured out rivers of lava and, above all, colossal quantities of poisonous gases — sulphur dioxide and fluorine — that poisoned the air, the water and the pastures. The fluorine poisoned the livestock: around half the country's cattle and a large share of its sheep and horses died. With no animals and the harvests ruined, the famine known as Móðuharðindin, "the mist hardships", followed. It is estimated that about a fifth of the Icelandic population died — some 9,000 people —; in Copenhagen there was even discussion of evacuating the island entirely.
The effects went far beyond Iceland. The "Laki haze" spread across Europe during the summer of 1783, with a reddish sun and unbreathable air, and the following winter was one of the harshest on record; poor harvests and shortages hit half of Europe. Some historians have suggested the hypothesis that this chain of failed harvests, hunger and discontent in France helped, among many other causes, to prepare the ground for the French Revolution of 1789. It is worth taking that for what it is — a debated hypothesis, not a proven fact: the Revolution had deep social and political roots, and Laki's concrete weight in it is still argued over by specialists.
The nineteenth century was the century of emigration and of national awakening. Driven out by poverty, by eruptions — such as Askja in 1875, which buried the east of the country in ash — and by a lack of land, tens of thousands of Icelanders left for North America between the 1870s and 1910. Many settled in Canada, in the Manitoba region on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, where they founded the colony of "New Iceland" around the town of Gimli, still today the largest concentration of people of Icelandic descent outside the island. It is estimated that around a fifth of the population emigrated.
At the same time the independence movement was growing, embodied above all in the figure of Jón Sigurðsson (1811-1879), a scholar and politician who led the struggle for autonomy from Denmark patiently and without violence. Under his leadership, Iceland obtained a constitution and a restored Alþingi with legislative powers in 1874, on the thousandth anniversary of the settlement. His birthday, 17 June, would later be chosen as Iceland's national day. The process continued in stages: in 1904 the country achieved Home Rule, and in 1918 it became the Kingdom of Iceland, a sovereign state linked to Denmark only through the person of the king and through foreign policy.
The Second World War brought matters to a head. When Germany occupied Denmark in April 1940, Iceland was cut off from its king, and the following month, in May 1940, British troops occupied the island to stop the Germans from doing so; in 1941 the United States took over. The occupation — accepted grudgingly but highly profitable economically — transformed the country, filling it with jobs, roads and money, and made staying tied to an occupied Denmark unworkable. On 17 June 1944, on the historic plain of Þingvellir, Iceland finally proclaimed the Republic, fully independent. Sveinn Björnsson was its first president. A thousand years after the Alþingi, the old republic of farmers was reborn as a modern state.
Independent Iceland made the sea its great affair of state. Fishing — cod above all — was the country's livelihood, and defending the fishing grounds against foreign fleets became a matter of national survival. Out of that came the so-called Cod Wars, a series of confrontations with the United Kingdom over three decades: when Iceland unilaterally extended its exclusive waters — to 4 miles in 1952, 12 in 1958, 50 in 1972 and 200 in 1975 —, British trawlers kept fishing under warship escort. The Icelandic coastguard responded by cutting the trawlers' nets with shears, and there were collisions, rammings and severe diplomatic tension. Despite being one of the smallest nations and having no army, Iceland won all three disputes: in the last one, around 1976, it went so far as to threaten to close the Keflavík military base and break with NATO, and the United Kingdom gave way. Those "wars", with barely a casualty, cemented the principle of the 200-mile exclusive economic zone that applies worldwide today.
That contest shows the strategic weight Iceland carried during the Cold War. Sitting in the middle of the North Atlantic, between America and Europe, the island was a key piece in the control of the ocean. Iceland was a founding member of NATO in 1949 — a decision that triggered riots in Reykjavík — and from 1951 hosted the large United States naval air base at Keflavík, without having an army of its own.
That position at a crossroads made Reykjavík the setting for a historic moment. On 11 and 12 October 1986, at Höfði house by the sea, United States president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met. The summit formally ended without agreement — it foundered on Reagan's strategic defence initiative — but the two leaders came surprisingly close to agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons, and the ground prepared there led, a year later, to the INF Treaty that removed intermediate-range missiles. Many consider the Reykjavík summit one of the great steps towards the end of the Cold War.
In the following decades Iceland modernised at speed and, at the start of the twenty-first century, staged a spectacular financial boom. Its three big banks — Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir — expanded around the world taking in foreign savings, above all British and Dutch (the "Icesave" accounts), until their assets came to be several times the size of the country's output. It was an unsustainable bubble: in October 2008, in the middle of the global financial crisis, all three banks collapsed almost at once. In proportion to the size of its economy, it was the largest banking collapse in the history of any country.
Iceland's response departed from the usual script. Instead of bailing out the banks with public money, the state let them fall, nationalised them and split them into a "good bank" and a "bad bank", guaranteeing domestic deposits but not the debts owed to foreign creditors. The króna collapsed, there were capital controls, mass protests — the "pots and pans revolution" that brought down the government — and, in time, court cases that sent dozens of bankers to prison, something unheard of elsewhere in the world. The economy sank and then recovered, resting on fishing, cheap energy and a tourism industry that would grow explosively in the years that followed.
And then the volcanoes came back. In 2010, the Eyjafjallajökull eruption threw an ash cloud into the atmosphere which, carried by the wind over Europe, forced the airspace of much of the continent to close for days: more than 100,000 flights were cancelled and millions of passengers were stranded, in the largest shutdown of air travel since the Second World War. More recently, the Reykjanes peninsula, on Reykjavík's doorstep, entered a new eruptive cycle after eight centuries of calm: since the Fagradalsfjall eruption in March 2021 there have been several eruptions, and from late 2023 the activity shifted towards the Sundhnúkur crater row, next to the fishing town of Grindavík. In November 2023 its nearly 4,000 inhabitants were evacuated as the magma advanced, and the successive eruptions damaged homes and infrastructure and left the town all but abandoned. Once again, the history of Iceland is written to the rhythm of the land that created it.
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At the head of Eyjafjörður, the longest fjord in Iceland, sits Akureyri, the largest town in the north and the country's second outside the Reykjavík area. Settled since the Settlement Age, it was for centuries a handful of farms and a small Danish trading post; it received market rights in 1786, when the monopoly was abolished, although its real growth came in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with trade, fishing and farming in the fertile valley around it.
Sheltered from the northern winds by the mountains and favoured by a relatively mild microclimate, Akureyri is surprisingly green for its latitude — it is barely a hundred kilometres from the Arctic Circle — and boasts one of the northernmost botanical gardens in the world. It became a cultural and intellectual centre for the north, with schools, a theatre and a life of its own that made it a natural counterweight to the capital.
Today Akureyri functions as the regional capital of all northern Iceland: a fishing port, a university town, a transport hub and the base from which you reach the region's great natural wonders, from Lake Mývatn to the Goðafoss waterfall — the "waterfall of the gods", where, according to tradition, the law speaker Þorgeir threw his pagan idols after the conversion of the year 1000. It is a small, welcoming town that concentrates the life of a vast territory of fjords and valleys.
East of Akureyri, the Lake Mývatn area is one of the great showcases of Icelandic volcanism. The lake, shallow and dotted with islets, was formed by ancient eruptions, and everything around it is a surreal landscape of craters, twisted lava fields, pseudocraters, fumaroles and pools of boiling mud. Underground, geothermal heat feeds thermal baths and a power station. The lake's wealth of insects — from which it takes its name, "lake of the midges" — also supports an extraordinary population of water birds, unique in Europe.
The great historical episode of the area is the Krafla Fires (Kröflueldar), a series of eruptions and volcanic episodes that shook the Krafla volcanic system between 1975 and 1984. For almost a decade the ground repeatedly split open in fissures, the land swelled and sank, and rivers of lava poured from the cracks, in a phenomenon scientists were able to study close up and that illustrated spectacularly how the tectonic plates separate along the ridge. The eruptions even threatened the geothermal power station then under construction at Krafla.
That activity is no accident: Mývatn and Krafla sit right on the rift zone, the fracture along which Iceland is tearing in two. Before the Krafla Fires, the region had lived through another great volcanic crisis in the eighteenth century, the so-called Mývatn Fires (1724-1729). Living here has always meant living on ground that cracks open; today that same energy is harnessed at the Krafla power station, and the volcanic landscape is one of the north's biggest draws.
Húsavík, a small port on Skjálfandi bay in the north, has become Iceland's "whale capital". Its waters, rich in food, attract numerous species in summer — humpback whales, minke, and with luck the enormous blue whale — and since the mid 1990s the town has made whale watching its main economic activity. Whale tourism transformed Húsavík: wooden boats set out every day in search of the giants of the sea, and the town is home to a remarkable Whale Museum explaining their biology and history. Curiously, Húsavík also claims to be the place where Garðar Svavarsson, a Norse settler who wintered there even before Ingólfur, is said to have stayed.
That boom in whale watching sits alongside an uncomfortable reality: Iceland is one of the few countries in the world that still allows commercial whaling. After the international moratorium, Iceland resumed hunting in the early twenty-first century, and it continues to grant licences to catch fin whales, the second largest species on the planet, classed as vulnerable. In 2024 the government gave the whaling company Hvalur a new licence to hunt more than a hundred fin whales, despite falling demand — the meat is exported mostly to Japan — and international pressure.
The question divides Icelandic society. Many defend hunting as a tradition and a sovereign right over their resources; others consider it cruel, economically marginal and at odds with the image of a country that makes far more money showing tourists live whales than killing them. The debate about the future of whaling — with proposals to ban it for good — is still open, and Húsavík, with its whale watching boats, embodies that tension between the two ways of relating to cetaceans better than anywhere else.
Seyðisfjörður, a village wedged into the head of a narrow fjord in the east, with coloured wooden houses brought over by Norwegian merchants in the late nineteenth century, played a decisive role in connecting Iceland to the world. For centuries the island had been almost cut off: news took weeks to arrive from Europe, carried by ship, and that remoteness reinforced its political and economic isolation under Danish rule.
That changed in 1906. That year the Great Northern Telegraph Company (Store Nordiske) laid a submarine cable that, running from Scotland and the Faroe Islands, came ashore in Iceland precisely at Seyðisfjörður. The service opened on 25 August 1906, and from the eastern fjord an overland line — held up by thousands of poles over hundreds of kilometres — finally carried the telegraph to Reykjavík. For the first time, Iceland could communicate with the rest of the world in minutes rather than weeks.
That cable was a revolution. It accelerated trade, the press and political life just as the country was moving towards self-government, and it put Seyðisfjörður on the map as Iceland's gateway for telecommunications. The town preserves that legacy today in its Technical Museum of East Iceland, and it also remains the only Icelandic port with a regular ferry link to mainland Europe, keeping its old role as a bridge between the island and the world. Its blue church and cobbled street have made it, over the years, one of the most photographed villages in the country.
The north and the east also carry the memory of the great emigration. In March 1875, the Askja volcano, in the highlands of the northeastern interior, erupted violently and threw enormous quantities of ash over the valleys of eastern Iceland. The ash poisoned the pastures, killed the livestock and ruined the farms of whole districts, at a time when the country was already suffering harsh winters, poverty and a shortage of land.
That disaster was one of the triggers of an unprecedented wave of migration. Between the 1870s and 1900, tens of thousands of Icelanders — many of them from the north and east — left the island for North America. A great many settled in Canada, in the province of Manitoba, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, where in 1875 they founded the colony of "New Iceland" around the town of Gimli. There they kept their language, their traditions and even a newspaper in Icelandic for generations, and to this day the community of descendants celebrates Íslendingadagurinn, the "Icelanders' Day", every year.
It is estimated that around a fifth of the country's population emigrated, an enormous demographic drain for such a small nation. That diaspora wove a lasting bond between Iceland and Canada, and left in the north and east the memory of the families who set out when the land — the volcano, the cold, the hunger — became impossible to live on. The region's history cannot be understood without those ships that sailed west carrying away so many of its children.
Southwest Iceland is the cradle of the country. According to the tradition recorded in the Landnámabók, it was here that Ingólfur Arnarson, considered the island's first permanent settler, came ashore around the year 874. The story goes that he threw the wooden pillars of his high seat into the sea and swore to settle wherever the waves left them; he found them in a bay with geothermal steam rising from it, and so he named it Reykjavík, "bay of smokes". That plume of steam that gave the future capital its name came from the same geothermal forces that heat the city today.
For centuries, however, Reykjavík was no more than a handful of farms. Iceland was a country without cities: the population lived scattered across rural holdings, and not even under Danish rule were there any real urban centres. Reykjavík only began to exist as a town in the eighteenth century, when the reformer Skúli Magnússon set up wool workshops there in the 1750s in an attempt to lift the country out of misery; the city's original core grew out of that modest industrial start.
That combination — the site of the first settlement and the seed of the country's only city — makes the southwest Iceland's historical heart. Within a small radius sit the great founding landmarks: Ingólfur's landing, the assembly at Þingvellir and the geothermal fields that would define Icelanders' relationship with their burning land.
Less than an hour from present-day Reykjavík lies Þingvellir, without question the place most loaded with history in all of Iceland. It is a plain cut through by a great fault: here, visibly, the rift between the North American and Eurasian plates opens up, with lava walls, fissures and a river running through it. On that unique geological stage the first Alþingi met, in the year 930, the general assembly of the Icelandic Commonwealth, one of the oldest parliaments in the world.
For more than eight centuries, every summer, the goðar and the free men came to Þingvellir to legislate, judge and negotiate. From the Lögberg, or Law Rock, the law speaker recited the laws from memory before the crowd; it was at the Alþingi that the country's peaceful conversion to Christianity was decided in the year 1000, and there that countless disputes recounted in the sagas were settled. For centuries the place was the symbolic centre of national life.
It is no accident that modern history returned to Þingvellir again and again. The thousandth anniversary of the settlement was celebrated there in 1874, and there, on 17 June 1944, the independent Republic of Iceland was proclaimed. Today Þingvellir is a National Park and a World Heritage Site, and forms part of the famous "Golden Circle" along with the Geysir hot spring — which gave its name to every geyser in the world — and the Gullfoss waterfall. Walking along its fault is walking through Iceland's geology and its political memory at the same time.
From those farms beside the bay of smokes grew the northernmost capital in the world. Reykjavík was granted town rights in 1786, when the Danish trade monopoly was lifted, but for a long time it remained a small, modest place. Its real growth came with the twentieth century: motorised fishing, independence and above all the Second World War, when the British and American occupation filled the area with construction work, jobs and money, and the countryside emptied into the city.
Today the Reykjavík metropolitan area holds close to two thirds of Iceland's population. It is the seat of the modern Alþingi, of the government and of the country's cultural life: this is where you find Hallgrímskirkja church dominating the skyline, the Harpa concert hall by the harbour, the museums and the vibrant music scene that produced figures such as Björk and Sigur Rós. Despite being a national capital, it is still a small city, low-rise and brightly coloured, ringed by sea and mountains.
Reykjavík embodies the Icelandic paradox: a nation of barely a few hundred thousand people that functions as a fully developed state, with one of the highest incomes and one of the highest gender equality rankings in the world. Powered almost entirely by geothermal and hydroelectric energy, it is also one of the cleanest capitals on the planet, heated by the same steam Ingólfur once saw rising from the ground.
Nothing sums up Icelanders' relationship with their burning land better than geothermal energy. Beneath the southwest of the country, underground heat warms enormous reserves of water that society has learned to use: almost every house in Reykjavík is heated with natural hot water pumped from the geothermal fields, a model developed over the twentieth century that made the country a world pioneer in renewable energy. Iceland gets practically all its electricity and heating from clean sources.
The tourist symbol of that geothermal energy is the Blue Lagoon (Bláa lónið), on the Reykjanes peninsula. Curiously, it is not an entirely natural phenomenon: the lagoon formed from the silica- and mineral-saturated water discharged by the Svartsengi geothermal plant, opened in the 1970s. People began bathing in that milky turquoise water, crediting it with benefits for the skin, and over time it became one of the country's most visited destinations, a warm-water spa in the middle of a black lava field.
That same area shows the two faces of geothermal power. The Svartsengi plant that feeds the Blue Lagoon supplies hot water and electricity to the whole Reykjanes region; but it sits right in the area that since 2023 has been threatened by the volcanic eruptions near Grindavík, which forced protective barriers to be built and operations to be halted several times. The water that gives pleasure and warmth comes from the same fire that sometimes destroys.
The Reykjanes peninsula, in the southwest, is the place in Iceland where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge comes out of the sea and onto dry land: here the rift between the two continents crosses the landscape, which is why it is one of the most geologically active zones in the country. For almost eight centuries, however, it stayed volcanically calm, and on it grew Keflavík international airport, the Svartsengi power plant, the Blue Lagoon and several fishing towns such as Grindavík.
That calm ended in March 2021. On 19 March a fissure opened at Geldingadalir, beside Mount Fagradalsfjall, in a quiet, drawn-out eruption that drew crowds of hikers and scientists. It was followed by further eruptions at Fagradalsfjall in 2022 and 2023, a sign that the peninsula had entered a new eruptive cycle that could last decades or centuries.
In late 2023 the activity turned dangerous. The magma shifted towards the Sundhnúkur crater row, right beneath the town of Grindavík: after thousands of earthquakes, its nearly 4,000 inhabitants were evacuated in November 2023, and on 18 December a large fissure opened. In January 2024 the lava reached the first houses in the town, and in February another eruption cut the Svartsengi hot water pipeline, leaving tens of thousands of people without heating in the depths of winter. Grindavík was left virtually empty. The Reykjanes eruptions are today the great reminder that Iceland is still a living land, making and unmaking itself under its inhabitants' feet.
Iceland's south coast lives under the threat of a peculiar and fearsome combination: volcanoes covered by glaciers. When one of those subglacial volcanoes erupts, the heat suddenly melts enormous quantities of ice, and the water built up beneath the glacier is released all at once in a catastrophic flood. Icelanders gave it a name of its own, now used by science worldwide: jökulhlaup, literally "glacier run". These are sudden surges that can carry along blocks of ice the size of houses and discharge, for hours, flows comparable to those of the biggest rivers on the planet.
Beneath the great Vatnajökull ice cap hides the Grímsvötn volcano, one of the most active in the country, responsible for repeated jökulhlaup throughout history. The Grímsvötn eruption of 1996 caused a colossal flood that wiped out bridges and roads along the south coast and dumped a plain of sand and ice into the sea. These episodes explain why much of the south is covered in sandur: vast plains of black sand and gravel laid down by centuries of glacial floods, a bleak and magnificent landscape.
Living here has always meant living with that risk. Farms were built on the few high, safe points, and collective memory holds the recollection of floods that erased roads and cut off whole districts. Today scientific monitoring of the subglacial volcanoes is constant, but the south coast is still a place where the geography can change in a single day.
Along the south coast runs a narrow habitable strip between the sea and the glaciers, and some of Iceland's oldest farms were established on it back in the Settlement Age. It is fertile but dangerous land: green pastures stretch literally in the shadow of volcanoes such as Hekla, Eyjafjallajökull and Katla, and the farmers' lives have always depended on the mountain's mood.
Hekla, in the interior of this region, was so feared in the Middle Ages that Christian Europe came to regard it as one of the mouths of Hell; its frequent, violent eruptions sowed the fields with ash and killed livestock. When Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010, the farms on its slopes were buried under ash and their inhabitants had to evacuate and spend months cleaning up land turned grey; the world remembers that eruption for the air travel chaos it caused, but for the farmers of the south it was, above all, a fight to save animals and crops.
That coexistence with danger forged a character. The sagas and the chronicles are full of accounts of families rebuilding their farms over and over after each eruption or flood. Even today, many of those holdings remain in the hands of the same families going back generations, and some have opened small museums or guesthouses that tell travellers what it means to farm and raise livestock on the very border between the habitable and the impossible.
The south is dominated by Vatnajökull, the largest glacier in Europe by volume, an ice cap that covers a good part of southeast Iceland and hides several active volcanoes beneath its mass. Numerous glacier tongues descend from its edges and, over millennia, carved out the valleys and carried the ice almost to the sea. That ice is, however, a climate archive: its advance and retreat record the planet's changes in temperature.
In recent decades the retreat has accelerated alarmingly. As the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier tongue melted, the Jökulsárlón lagoon formed, well into the twentieth century: a glacial lake of freezing water where icebergs calved from the glacier front float, drifting slowly out to sea and sometimes stranding on the black sand beach, the so-called "diamond beach". The lagoon did not exist a century ago; it was born and keeps growing as the glacier pulls back, and today it is one of the most photographed landscapes in Iceland and, at the same time, a visible thermometer of climate change.
Global warming is very much a live issue in Iceland. In 2014 the country officially declared Okjökull "dead", the first Icelandic glacier lost to warming, and in 2019 it placed a commemorative plaque there addressed to the future. Glaciologists warn that, if the trend continues, much of Iceland's glacier cover could disappear over the coming centuries. Jökulsárlón, with its serene beauty of drifting ice, has thus become a symbol of that foretold loss.
Vík í Mýrdal, the southernmost village in Iceland, lives literally in the shadow of a danger. Above it rises the Mýrdalsjökull glacier, and under the ice hides Katla, one of the largest and most feared volcanoes in the country. Katla has erupted violently many times throughout history — on average, several times a century — and each eruption unleashes devastating jökulhlaup that sweep the plain between the mountain and the sea. The last recognised major eruption was in 1918, which means that, going by its historical rhythm, the volcano is more than a century overdue: Icelanders know Katla will wake again, and it is a question not of if but when.
That is why Vík is also a village prepared for catastrophe. The church, set on top of a hill, is designed as a refuge: in the event of an eruption and flood, the population is expected to run up to it, the only point that would stay clear of the glacial surge. Drills are held, and seismic monitoring of Katla is permanent.
Around Vík unfolds one of the most spectacular landscapes on the south coast: the black volcanic sand beaches of Reynisfjara, with their basalt columns and the Reynisdrangar sea stacks rising from the water, wrapped in legends of trolls turned to stone by the dawn. It is a beautiful and treacherous coast, of sudden waves and dangerous currents, that sums up the spirit of the whole region: extreme beauty on the edge of risk.
Behind the southern coastal strip opens another world: the Highlands, Iceland's vast uninhabited interior. It is a high plateau of ash deserts, lava fields, glaciers and unbridged rivers, where there were never any permanent settlements and where to this day nobody lives. For centuries this interior was no man's land, crossed only by the routes linking the north and south of the country, and a refuge for the útlagar, the outlaws condemned by the Alþingi who survived as best they could far from any community — a recurring motif in the sagas and in Icelandic folklore.
On the southern edge of the Highlands lies Landmannalaugar, famous for its rhyolite mountains stained ochre, red, green and yellow, and for the natural hot springs travellers bathe in after their hike. The area is part of an active geothermal zone and is the starting point of the Laugavegur, considered one of the most beautiful mountain trails in the world. It can only be reached in summer, with off-road vehicles able to ford the rivers, since in winter the Highlands are closed by snow.
That isolation made the interior an almost mythical space in Icelandic culture: a place of huldufólk (the "hidden people" of folklore), of fugitives and of extreme natural phenomena. Today it is a protected natural sanctuary and a hiking destination, but it keeps its untamed character. Travelling the Highlands is stepping into the purest and most merciless Iceland, the same one the medieval settlers never managed to tame.
Western Iceland is, more than any other region, saga country. Some of the great medieval Icelandic narratives take place in the valleys of Borgarfjörður and on the Snæfellsnes peninsula: Egil's Saga, whose hero is the warrior-poet Egil Skallagrímsson, whose family settled at Borg; or the Saga of the People of Laxárdalur (Laxdæla saga), one of the most admired, with its heroine Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir and her tragic story of love and revenge, set around the Breiðafjörður fjord.
But the greatest name of the west is Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241), the finest writer of medieval Iceland, who lived and ruled from Reykholt in Borgarfjörður. A historian, poet and immensely powerful politician, Snorri composed the Prose Edda — the handbook of Norse mythology and poetry without which we would barely know the Viking gods — and the Heimskringla, the great history of the kings of Norway. At Reykholt you can still see Snorralaug, the old circular thermal pool linked to his name, and the remains of his farm.
Snorri also embodied the tragedy of his age. Caught up in the power struggles of the Age of the Sturlungs and in his complicated relationship with the Norwegian crown, he was finally murdered in the cellar of his house at Reykholt in September 1241, on the indirect orders of King Haakon of Norway. His last words, according to tradition — "Eigi skal höggva", "do not strike" —, were engraved in Icelandic memory. That the greatest literary work of the Scandinavian Middle Ages should have come out of those farms in western Iceland is one of the region's great sources of pride.
The west, with its fjords open to the Atlantic and its abundant fishing grounds, was for centuries one of Iceland's great larders. Dried cod was, from the Middle Ages onwards, the country's main export: it was caught from rowing boats in winter and spring, air-dried on the beaches and shipped to Europe, where demand for fish on Christian fast days made it a valuable commodity. Much of the Icelandic economy depended on cod long before any industry existed.
That wealth attracted foreign fleets. From the fifteenth century, English ships, German vessels of the Hanseatic League and, later, French and other nations frequented these waters, sometimes trading and sometimes in conflict with the Icelanders and with the Danish crown that claimed the monopoly. The fjords of the west and the Westfjords were the setting for that competition, with seasonal fishing stations where people from different countries lived side by side and clashed.
Dependence on cod shaped the country's fate right up to the twentieth century. The modernisation of the fleet, with the first steam trawlers at the start of the 1900s, sent output soaring and laid the foundations of modern Iceland; and the defence of those fishing grounds against British fleets would lead, in the second half of the century, to the Cod Wars. To this day fishing remains one of the pillars of the Icelandic economy, and the towns of the west keep their seafaring character.
At the western tip of the Snæfellsnes peninsula rises Snæfellsjökull, a conical volcano crowned by a glacier that dominates the landscape and that can be seen, on clear days, from distant Reykjavík across the bay. Its perfect silhouette and its air of mystery loaded it with legends, and gave it an unexpected place in world literature.
It was the French writer Jules Verne who made it famous around the world. In his novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Professor Lidenbrock and his companions descend precisely through the crater of Snæfellsjökull to begin their expedition into the bowels of the planet. Verne was never in Iceland, but he chose this real volcano as the gateway to his underground world, and in doing so tied the mountain's name forever to the imagination of generations of readers.
The Snæfellsnes peninsula, sometimes called "Iceland in miniature" because it brings together glaciers, lava fields, beaches, cliffs and fishing villages in a small space, is today a National Park centred on the glacier. Its villages — such as Arnarstapi or Hellnar — preserve the memory of the old seafaring Iceland, and many visitors come drawn as much by the nature as by the echo of Verne's novel. Snæfellsjökull remains, for many, the most literary mountain in Iceland.
In the northwest, the Westfjords are the most remote, mountainous and thinly populated region of Iceland: a peninsula cut by deep fjords, joined to the rest of the country by a narrow isthmus, with cliffs where millions of seabirds nest. Its isolation made it the setting for extraordinary stories, and one of the darkest happened in the autumn of 1615.
That year, several Basque whaling ships — then called "Spanish" — were working in the Westfjords under an agreement with the Icelanders to hunt whales. Just as they were preparing to leave, a storm smashed their vessels against the rocks; some eighty sailors survived, but were left stranded and without resources, and conflicts broke out with the local population over food and supplies. The district sheriff, Ari Magnússon, issued a ruling declaring them outlaws, and over the following weeks groups of Icelanders killed some thirty-two Basque whalers. It was the last documented massacre in Icelandic history, known as the "Slaying of the Spaniards" (Spánverjavígin).
That ruling authorising the killing of Basques on sight remained, incredibly, in force for centuries. Only on 22 April 2015, four hundred years later, did the district commissioner of the Westfjords, Jónas Guðmundsson, officially revoke it, during the unveiling of a monument at Hólmavík in memory of the murdered whalers, in an act of reconciliation with the Basque Country. The episode also left a curious legacy: contact between Basque whalers and Icelanders produced a Basque-Icelandic pidgin, of which glossaries survive, one of the few records of that tragic coexistence.
The same steep fjords that give the Westfjords their beauty make them deadly dangerous in winter. Many fishing villages are packed onto a narrow strip of land between the sea and snow-covered slopes, exposed to avalanches. In 1995, two disasters in a row shook the whole country.
The first came in the early hours of 16 January 1995, when a 400-metre-wide avalanche fell on the village of Súðavík in the middle of a storm, destroying fifteen houses and killing fourteen people, eight of them children. Barely nine months later, on 26 October 1995, another avalanche came down the Skollahvilft slope onto the village of Flateyri, flattening seventeen homes and causing twenty deaths. In all, the two avalanches of that year took thirty-four lives in small communities where everyone knew everyone.
The impact on the national conscience was enormous. Iceland realised that a considerable number of its towns were built in zones of unacceptable risk, and the tragedies of 1995 triggered a radical change in safety policy: large dams and deflecting barriers were built to protect the threatened settlements, hazard maps were drawn up and homes were relocated. Those retaining walls you see today above Flateyri, Súðavík or Ísafjörður are the silent legacy of one of the greatest tragedies of modern Iceland, and a reminder that in the Westfjords the mountain is also in charge.