🇮🇸 Iceland · North and east
Húsavík is one of those places that sound far bigger than they are. This fishing village on the north coast of Iceland, with barely 2,300 inhabitants and coloured houses looking out over a tiny harbour, is known around the world as the 'whale watching capital of Europe'. Not for hunting them — that is another story, painful and still unresolved in Iceland — but for watching them: the country's first commercial whale watching trip set out from here in 1995, and since then the sea off Skjálfandi bay has become one of the best places on the planet to see cetaceans.
In season, the old wooden sailing boats leave several times a day for a bay where humpback whales, minke whales, white-beaked dolphins and, on the best days, even blue whales, the largest animal that ever lived, come to feed. The sighting rate has run at around 97% over the past three decades. Back on land, the Whale Museum, the wooden church from 1907, the GeoSea geothermal baths perched over the fjord and the 'Ja Ja Ding Dong' bar round out a village that also became world famous thanks to the Netflix film 'Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga' (2020), shot here.
This guide covers Húsavík in a practical and honest way: which whales you see and when, how much each trip costs and with which company, what to do on bad weather days, how to use the village as a base for the Diamond Circle, and also the uncomfortable contradiction worth knowing about: that while Húsavík lives on showing live whales, Iceland still authorises — with current licences and an international moratorium it has not signed up to — the commercial hunting of these animals.
According to the Landnámabók (the Book of Settlements), Húsavík was the first place in Iceland where a Norseman spent the winter: around the year 870, the Swedish Viking Garðar Svavarsson sailed around the island, wintered in this bay and built some houses, which is where the name 'Húsavík', 'bay of houses', comes from. He is considered one of the first Europeans to set foot in Iceland, even before Ingólfur Arnarson in Reykjavík. For centuries it was a cod fishing port; in the twentieth century it grew with the arrival of motor boats and the herring boom, and since 1995 it has completely reinvented itself around whale watching, which is now its economic engine and its identity. The full story — from Garðar to the whaling moratorium and Eurovision — 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.
Long before Húsavík was famous for whales, it was — according to tradition — the first place in Iceland where a Norseman spent a whole winter. The story is written in the Landnámabók, the 'Book of Settlements', the medieval chronicle that records the colonisation of the island. It tells how, around the year 870, a Swedish seafarer named Garðar Svavarsson reached these shores, sailed all the way round Iceland — establishing that it was an island — and decided to winter in a sheltered bay in the north. He put up some houses there to see out the cold, and from those buildings came the name of the place: Húsavík, literally 'the bay of houses'.
The fact carries enormous symbolic weight. Garðar Svavarsson is considered by many to be one of the first Europeans to settle, however temporarily, on Icelandic soil, even before Ingólfur Arnarson, the Norwegian settler who around 874 established himself permanently in Reykjavík and whom tradition recognises as Iceland's official 'first settler'. The difference is subtle but real: Ingólfur stayed and founded a lineage; Garðar only wintered and sailed on. That is why Húsavík claims, with local pride and no little irony, to be 'the first settlement in Iceland', even though the title of first permanent colony belongs to the capital.
Beyond the dispute over honours, what is certain is that Skjálfandi bay offered what a Norse settler needed: shelter, abundant fish and fresh water. Over the following centuries, in the medieval Iceland of the sagas and the Commonwealth, the area remained a handful of scattered farms devoted to subsistence agriculture and coastal fishing. There was not yet a village, but a landscape of fjords and meadows where a few families survived on the edge of the Arctic Circle.
For much of its history, Húsavík was what almost every coastal village in Iceland was: a place that lived off the sea, and off cod in particular. Fishing was done by hand, from open rowing boats that went out into the bay in the harshest conditions, and trade was long controlled by the Danish monopoly, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suffocated the Icelandic economy by forcing people to trade only with the crown's merchants. Húsavík served as one of those small trading ports where dried fish was exchanged for flour, timber and imported goods.
The great leap came in the nineteenth century and, above all, at the start of the twentieth. The abolition of the Danish trade monopoly (1787) and then free trade (1855) let the village grow as a service and commercial centre for the whole farming region of Þingeyjarsýsla. But what really changed the scale was the arrival of technology: in the first decade of the twentieth century the first motor boats appeared, multiplying what a handful of fishermen could catch. A couple of decades later a permanent harbour was built, and with it fishing jumped from subsistence to industry.
Added to that transformation, as all along Iceland's north and east coasts, was the herring fever. Between the late nineteenth century and the mid twentieth, enormous shoals of herring — 'the silver of the sea', as they called it — drew fleets, salting and oil plants, and feverish prosperity to the northern ports. Although the epicentre of Iceland's 'herring adventure' was further north (at Siglufjörður), Húsavík took part in that fishing boom that financed much of the country's modernisation. Herring, however, was capricious: the collapse of the shoals in the late 1960s hit the whole of Iceland and forced the fishing villages to reinvent themselves. Húsavík went on living from cod and fish processing, a quiet working town, with no suspicion that its future would arrive, literally, leaping out of the water.
The moment that defined modern Húsavík was not a battle or a catastrophe but a simple and somewhat risky idea: instead of hunting whales or fishing, why not take tourists out to see them alive? In 1995, a local family launched Iceland's first commercial whale watching trip from Húsavík harbour. The pioneering company was North Sailing, which converted old oak fishing boats to take visitors out into Skjálfandi bay. The bet paid off beyond all expectation.
The bay turned out to be an ideal stage. Fed by cold, nutrient-rich water coming down from the mountains and glaciers, Skjálfandi is a larder where plankton and fish gather, and with them the whales that come to feed in summer: humpbacks, minkes, white-beaked dolphins, porpoises and, on the best days, the colossal blue whale. The sighting rate climbed to extraordinary figures — around 97% over the following decades — something few places in the world can offer. Word got round, more companies arrived, and the fishing harbour filled with sailing boats carrying bundled-up tourists and cameras.
In 1997, barely two years after the first trip, the Whale Museum (Hvalasafn) opened in a converted old slaughterhouse, with real cetacean skeletons hanging from the ceiling and displays about their biology and conservation. Húsavík began calling itself the 'whale watching capital of Europe', and whale tourism completely transformed its economy: from a declining fishing village it became an international destination. Today a large share of the village's jobs, hotels, restaurants and shops depend directly or indirectly on whales — living ones. In 2018 another jewel was added, the GeoSea geothermal baths, which use hot sea water in infinity pools perched over the fjord, cementing Húsavík as a nature and wellbeing destination, not just a fishing one.
The story of Húsavík cannot be understood without its uncomfortable flip side: while the village lives on showing live whales, Iceland is one of the last countries in the world that still authorises commercial whaling. It is worth telling with the facts and without campaigning, because it is a real tension in the country.
In 1982 the International Whaling Commission (IWC) approved a worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling, which came into force in the 1985-1986 season as many populations collapsed after centuries of industrial hunting. Iceland initially complied, moved to a controversial 'scientific hunt' and in 1992 went as far as withdrawing from the IWC. In 2002 it rejoined, but did so with an express reservation to the moratorium, a legal device that allows it — by its own interpretation — to keep hunting despite the international ban. Since 2006, Iceland has resumed commercial whaling, focused above all on the fin whale (the second largest on the planet, classed as 'vulnerable' by the IUCN) to export its meat mainly to Japan, and to a lesser extent on the minke whale for the domestic market.
The main player is the company Hvalur hf., run by the businessman Kristján Loftsson. In December 2024, the Icelandic government granted it a five-year licence to hunt up to 209 fin whales a year between 2025 and 2029, a decision heavily criticised by conservation organisations. The activity has become economically fragile, however: the 2023 season ended with 24 whales killed amid a scandal over an official report documenting prolonged deaths, and in 2024 and 2025 the hunt was cancelled outright, according to the company itself because of the collapse in the price of the meat in Japan. Towards 2026, Hvalur announced its intention to resume hunting, while the government committed to bringing forward a law to ban commercial whaling. Minke whaling for the tourist and restaurant market, for its part, practically ceased in 2020.
Húsavík is on the other side of this story. Whale tourism brings in far more money and employment than hunting, and much of Icelandic society — and almost the entire tourism sector — sees whaling as an anachronism that damages the country's image. The village became, without setting out to, a symbol of that other Iceland: the one that chooses to look at whales through a camera viewfinder rather than down a harpoon.
In October 2019, a Hollywood crew landed in Húsavík to shoot much of a Netflix comedy starring Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams: 'Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga', released in 2020. The film tells the story of Lars and Sigrit, two musicians from a small Icelandic village who dream of winning the Eurovision Song Contest, and it turned Húsavík — the characters' fictional home town — into a location and almost into a character. You see the harbour, the coloured houses and the wooden church from 1907, where Ferrell's character rings the bell.
The film was a worldwide hit and had an unexpected twist: the song 'Húsavík (My Hometown)', a moving ballad about coming home, was nominated for the Oscar for best original song in 2021. The whole village joined the campaign with 'Húsavík for Oscars' posters, and although the statuette got away, the exposure was priceless publicity. Nods survive everywhere today: a 'Ja Ja Ding Dong' themed bar — after the catchy song the film's audience demands from the band over and over — in the harbour hotel, and a small museum devoted to the film.
Today's Húsavík is a village of around 2,300 people that lives on nature tourism without losing its fishing soul. It combines whale and puffin trips, the Whale Museum, the GeoSea baths, the wooden church and even a curious Exploration Museum recalling that the Apollo programme astronauts trained in the lunar landscapes of northern Iceland before walking on the Moon. It is also one of the best bases for touring the Diamond Circle, with the Goðafoss and Dettifoss waterfalls and the Ásbyrgi canyon. From Garðar Svavarsson's 'bay of houses' to the 'whale watching capital of Europe' that almost won an Oscar, Húsavík is proof of how a tiny Arctic village managed to reinvent itself by looking out to sea.