🇮🇸 Iceland · North and east
For many people Seyðisfjörður is the prettiest village in Iceland, and you only have to arrive to see why. After crossing a bare, sometimes snowy mountain pass, the road winds down towards the head of a narrow, deep fjord ringed by green slopes streaked with waterfalls. Below appears the village: a handful of coloured wooden houses, unmistakably Norwegian in style, arranged around a lagoon and a harbour. In the centre, a street painted in rainbow colours leads, like a carpet, to a delicate wooden church painted blue: the Bláa kirkjan, the village's most famous image.
With barely 700 inhabitants, Seyðisfjörður has a density of art, history and beauty out of all proportion to its size. It was founded by Norwegian herring merchants in the nineteenth century, who brought the prefabricated wooden houses from their country that still stand today. This is where, in 1906, the first submarine telegraph cable connecting Iceland to the rest of the world came ashore. In its fjord lies the wreck of a British tanker sunk by German aircraft in 1944, now a diving site. And for decades it has been a magnet for artists, with its festival and its LungA art school filling it with creativity in summer.
This guide covers Seyðisfjörður in a practical, honest way: what to see in the village and its waterfalls, how to get here over the mountain pass (and why in winter you have to check the forecast), how the Norröna ferry works — the only way to enter Iceland by sea — and also its harshest recent history: the mudslide of December 2020 that destroyed part of the village without any loss of life, and from which Seyðisfjörður rose again.
Seyðisfjörður came into being as a village in the mid nineteenth century, when Norwegian merchants and fishermen arrived drawn by herring, 'the silver of the sea', and brought with them the prefabricated Norwegian-style wooden houses that still define its look today. Its deep, sheltered fjord made it a strategic port: in 1906 the first submarine telegraph cable linking Iceland with Europe came ashore there, ending the country's isolation. During the Second World War it was a base for Allied troops, and in 1944 German aircraft sank the British tanker El Grillo in its bay, now one of the country's most famous diving sites. In recent decades it has reinvented itself as a village of artists, with the LungA festival and school. In December 2020 it suffered the largest mudslide ever to hit an Icelandic settlement, which destroyed several houses without causing any deaths; the village was rebuilt. 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.
Seyðisfjörður is, in origin, an almost Norwegian village planted at the head of an Icelandic fjord. Although the area had been inhabited since the Viking settlement period — tradition attributes the fjord's first settlement to a colonist named Bjólfur, and excavations in the late 1990s brought to light the ruins of an eleventh-century wooden church — the village as we know it came much later, in the mid nineteenth century, and it did so looking out to the sea and to Norway.
Around 1848 merchants and fishermen began to arrive, and from the 1870s the fjord became one of the great centres of the herring fishery, 'the silver of the sea'. It was above all Norwegian entrepreneurs who saw the potential of those silver shoals and set up fishing stations, salting plants and trading houses here. With them came something unheard of in Iceland: prefabricated wooden houses, ordered and assembled in Norway and brought by ship piece by piece, put up at the foot of the fjord as if from a catalogue of Nordic architecture. Painted in colours and decorated with carpentry detail, those merchants' and captains' homes are what still give Seyðisfjörður its unique look, so different from the rest of a country where timber was always a scarce luxury.
The fjord — deep, narrow and well sheltered — was an excellent natural harbour, able to take large ships, and that made it one of the most prosperous and cosmopolitan villages in late nineteenth-century Iceland. Fish, trade and news of the world passed across its quays. That early prosperity explains why such a small, remote place became, for decades, a spearhead of the country's modernisation.
The historical event that marked Seyðisfjörður most — and gave it a place in the history of all Iceland — happened in 1906. That year, the village became the point where the first submarine telegraph cable connecting Iceland with the rest of the world came ashore. The cable came from Europe, via the Faroe Islands and with connections to Scotland and Denmark, and its arrival in the eastern fjord meant the end of the island's communications isolation.
Until then, news between Iceland and the continent travelled by ship and could take weeks. With the telegraph cable, a message that used to take days or weeks was transmitted in minutes. The impact was enormous for a country fighting for autonomy from Denmark and needing to stay in contact with Copenhagen and with the markets. Seyðisfjörður became the 'gateway' through which Iceland plugged into the world, and a nerve centre of national communications.
That pioneering role extended to other technologies. The village was at the forefront of the telegraph and the telephone, and in 1913 it started up Iceland's first high-voltage hydroelectric station with a distribution network, bringing electric light to the streets and houses when much of the country was still lit by oil lamps. Much of that technical memory is preserved today in the Technical Museum of East Iceland (Tækniminjasafn Austurlands), founded in 1984, which tells how this little fjord village was for decades one of the most advanced and connected places on the whole island.
During the Second World War, Seyðisfjörður's strategic position counted once again. After the occupation of Iceland by British troops in 1940 (and later American ones), the village, with its deep, sheltered fjord, became an important Allied naval base in the North Atlantic, a gathering point for convoys and a fuel supply station for the ships crossing those dangerous waters.
That military importance put it in the enemy's sights. On 10 February 1944, German Luftwaffe aircraft, based in occupied Norway, attacked the fjord. Their target was the El Grillo (Italian for 'the cricket'), a British supply tanker anchored in the bay. After taking several hits and being seriously damaged, the crew decided deliberately to scuttle the ship to stop her being lost entirely or falling into enemy hands. The El Grillo went to the bottom of the fjord, where she still lies at about 40 metres depth.
Over time, that wartime wreck turned into a peaceful attraction: today the El Grillo is one of the most famous wreck diving sites in Iceland, visited by divers with technical certification who descend to explore her hull covered in marine life. It is a silent testimony, underwater, to the years when the war reached this remote eastern fjord. Even a popular Icelandic beer carries her name, in tribute to the story. The mark of the war is also told on land, in the stories and objects the village preserves.
In the second half of the twentieth century, with the herring crisis and changes in the fishing industry, many villages in eastern Iceland lost population and looked for new directions. Seyðisfjörður found its own in an unexpected place: art. Its coloured wooden houses, its fjord landscape and its sheltered atmosphere began to attract creators of every kind.
A key figure was the celebrated Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth, one of the great names of twentieth-century art, who spent time in the area and in 1996 promoted the creation of a visual art collective there. On that seed grew the LungA festival, an international young art festival held every summer since 2000 that fills the village with workshops, music, performances and colour for a week. In 2013 the project took a further step with the founding of the LungA School, Iceland's first art 'folk high school', where students from around the world spend periods fully devoted to creativity.
Today Seyðisfjörður is, despite its scant 700 inhabitants, one of the most vibrant cultural hubs in the country: galleries, artists' studios, cafés with work on the walls and a bohemian life that sits alongside that of the fishing village. The rainbow street leading to the blue church, painted by the residents themselves, and the Tvísöngur sound sculpture by the German artist Lukas Kühne on the mountainside are symbols of that creative identity. Art here is not a backdrop for tourists but a way of life that reinvented the village.
The recent history of Seyðisfjörður has a dramatic and very real chapter worth knowing. In December 2020, after several days of exceptionally heavy rain that soaked the slopes above the village, the mountain gave way. On 18 December, a series of mudslides came down onto the inhabited area in what became the largest mudslide ever to hit a settlement in Iceland. The flow of mud swept away historic houses and dragged whole buildings into the fjord.
The material toll was devastating: some 39 houses were damaged, twelve of them completely destroyed, with losses of more than a billion Icelandic krónur. The Technical and Industrial Museum was one of the worst hit, losing buildings and part of its collection. But there was one decisive and fortunate fact: because the authorities had evacuated the danger zone in time, having spotted the risk, there was not a single death. In a disaster of that scale, that nobody died was almost a miracle, and it was down to prevention.
Then came the reconstruction. Defences and retaining barriers against future landslides were built on the slope, homes were repaired or replaced and, from October 2021, evacuated residents were able to return. Seyðisfjörður recovered and went on being what it was: one of the most beautiful and creative villages in Iceland. Today it welcomes travellers arriving over the mountain pass or on the Norröna ferry with its rainbow street, its coloured wooden houses and its blue church, but also with the fresh memory of that December when the mountain came down on the village and it managed, once again, to reinvent itself and get back up.