🇮🇸 Iceland · West and Snæfellsnes
The Westfjords are the Iceland almost nobody sees: the most remote, geologically oldest and least visited corner of the country, an enormous peninsula of deep fjords, flat-topped mountains and gravel roads dropping away above the sea. While the bulk of tourism travels the south and the Golden Circle, here in the northwest you can drive for hours without meeting anyone, sleep in fishing villages of a handful of houses and truly feel the scale and solitude of the North Atlantic. It is worth saying honestly: this is not a weekend destination or one for people in a hurry, but for anyone with days to spare and an appetite for quiet adventure.
The prize matches the effort. This is where you find Dynjandi, the 'jewel of the Westfjords', a stepped waterfall a hundred metres high that spreads out like a bridal veil. There are the Látrabjarg cliffs, one of the westernmost points in Europe, where millions of birds nest and puffins let you photograph them from metres away (with a serious warning: the edge is soft peat and it crumbles, and there have been fatal falls). There is the reddish beach of Rauðasandur, the wild, roadless Hornstrandir reserve, natural hot pools hidden along the coast, and museums as singular as the Arctic Fox Centre in Súðavík or the Museum of Sorcery in Hólmavík.
This guide covers the Westfjords in a practical, realistic way: what to see, how to get there (by car, on the Baldur ferry or by plane to Ísafjörður), how to get around on its slow roads, what everything costs in Icelandic krónur with the equivalent in euros, where to sleep and eat in a region with scarce services, and above all what precautions to take in a place with treacherous weather where the wind can rip the car door off and where straying off a path can cost you dearly.
The Westfjords were one of the first places settled in Iceland and the setting for dark, beautiful sagas, such as that of Gísli Súrsson, the outlaw who survived thirteen years on the run through these fjords. This is where the 1615 killing of shipwrecked Basque whalers took place ('the slaying of the Spaniards'), a brutal episode whose death order was not formally revoked until 2015. In the district of Strandir, the seventeenth-century witch hunt had the Icelandic peculiarity of persecuting mostly men. In the twentieth century, the hardness of life emptied much of the region: Hornstrandir was abandoned in 1952, and in 1995 two devastating avalanches at Súðavík and Flateyri shook the whole of Iceland and changed the country's prevention policy forever. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The land of the sagas and of Snorri Sturluson, of cod and of the great fjords; the Snæfellsnes peninsula with the volcano Jules Verne chose as the doorway to the centre of the Earth, and the remote Westfjords, scene of the 1615 killing of Basque whalers and of the tragic avalanches of 1995.
Read the history of West and Snæfellsnes →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Westfjords were one of the first areas of Iceland to be settled. In the late ninth and early tenth centuries, Norwegian and Celtic settlers from the British Isles sailed up these deep fjords looking for land and, above all, for the country's richest fishing waters. It was a hard settlement: narrow valleys between flat-topped mountains, very long winters and a sea that was generous but deadly. From that period comes one of the most intense narratives of medieval Icelandic literature, set precisely in these fjords: Gísla saga Súrssonar, the Saga of Gísli Súrsson.
Gísli was a tragic hero of the tenth century, in the Dýrafjörður area. The saga tells of a spiral of honour, revenge and broken loyalties: after avenging the death of a brother-in-law, Gísli is declared an outlaw (skógarmaður, 'man of the forest', that is, outside the law and without protection). For thirteen years he survives on the run through the Westfjords, hiding in caves and helped by his faithful wife Auður, until at last his pursuers corner him and he falls fighting. The saga, composed in the thirteenth century, is famous for its prophetic dreams and for portraying the conflict between the duty of revenge and blood ties. To this day you can visit the places in Dýrafjörður associated with his story.
These sagas are not exact chronicles, but they fixed the identity of the Westfjords as a land of tough, isolated people hardened by nature, a character that would shape their history in the centuries that followed.
In the autumn of 1615 one of the darkest episodes in Icelandic history took place in the Westfjords. That summer, three Basque whaling ships (from the Spanish Basque Country) had been working in the region, at a time when Basques were pioneers of whaling in the North Atlantic. In September, a storm smashed their ships in Reykjarfjörður: some eighty men were left shipwrecked ashore, with no way home and facing an Icelandic winter.
Relations with the local population deteriorated — there were accusations of theft and looting by some of the hungry castaways — and the situation turned into tragedy. The district sheriff, Ari Magnússon of Ögur, gathered armed men and, relying on an interpretation of the old Icelandic legal code of 1281, passed a death sentence on the Basques, declaring them outlaws who could lawfully be killed. In two episodes in October 1615 and January 1616, some thirty-two Basque whalers were murdered. Another group managed to escape in a stolen ship. The events were recorded in the 'True account' (Sönn frásaga) written by the scholar Jón Guðmundsson, a witness who condemned the killing.
The most astonishing part is the episode's long legal tail: the order declaring the Basques outlaws in that district was never formally revoked. Only on 22 April 2015, four centuries later, did the district commissioner of the Westfjords officially repeal the decree, and a memorial stone was raised at Hólmavík in memory of the victims, in an act of reconciliation attended by a descendant of one of the whalers and a descendant of one of the perpetrators. It is a real event, and it is worth telling plainly: it was the last documented massacre in Icelandic history.
In the seventeenth century, while much of Europe was burning witches, the Westfjords — and especially the remote Strandir district on the east coast — lived through their own hunt for sorcerers, with one peculiarity that sets it apart from almost the whole continent: in Iceland, the vast majority of those accused and executed for witchcraft were men, not women. Of the twenty or so people burned for sorcery in the whole of Iceland that century, almost all were male, and several died at the stake in Strandir between the 1650s and 1680s.
The Icelandic magic they were accused of was not the European witches' sabbath but a folk tradition of its own, tied to the written word and to books: galdrar (spells) were worked with 'magical runes' (galdrastafir), runic formulas and symbols scrawled on skin or wood to attract luck, love, a good catch or harm against an enemy. Folklore recorded macabre rituals such as the nábrókarbuxur, 'necropants' supposedly made from a corpse's skin to attract wealth. In a poor, literate and very religious society after the Lutheran Reformation, owning one of those symbols or a 'black book' could be enough to end up at the stake.
That story is told today in the excellent Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft at Hólmavík, in Strandir, which treats the subject with historical rigour and without sensationalism. It is a chapter that, along with the killing of the Basques, reveals the harshest and most superstitious side of life in these isolated fjords, where fear, poverty and religious zeal could turn deadly.
For centuries, life in the Westfjords rested on fishing and subsistence farming in extreme conditions. But the twentieth century, with Iceland's modernisation, hit this remote region particularly hard. The mechanisation of fishing, the concentration of activity in a few large ports, the lack of roads and the harshness of the climate pushed people to emigrate to Reykjavík and the towns. The most isolated fjords, with no roads or electricity, became unsustainable.
The most emblematic case is Hornstrandir, the northernmost peninsula of the Westfjords. Its inhabitants, who for generations had lived from fishing, hunting birds and collecting eiderdown, gradually left until it emptied completely: the last residents of Hesteyri and the northern bays departed in 1952, and in the following years Grunnavík (1962) and Aðalvík (around 1963) were depopulated. With the houses shut and the fields silent, nature reclaimed the territory. In 1975, Hornstrandir was declared a protected nature reserve, and today it is one of the last great wildernesses in Europe, with no roads and no residents, a kingdom of the Arctic fox and enormous bird colonies. Its abandoned hamlets, with graves and foundations among the grass, are a moving testimony to a way of life that disappeared in barely a generation.
That emptying shaped the present character of the Westfjords: an enormous region with very few people (some 7,000 inhabitants in total), where the landscape dominates and the human mark is faint. That is, in large part, what makes it so special for today's traveller.
The year 1995 was seared into the memory of the Westfjords and of all Iceland by two natural disasters. In the early hours of 16 January 1995, a large snow avalanche came down on the fishing village of Súðavík, burying houses while people slept: 14 people died, eight of them children. A few months later, on 26 October 1995, another avalanche destroyed part of the village of Flateyri, in Önundarfjörður, killing 20. They were the worst natural disasters of modern Iceland, and they struck a small nation where everyone seemed to know one of the victims.
The impact was so deep that it changed the country's prevention policy forever. The Icelandic state undertook a huge programme of avalanche defences: walls and retaining dykes were built above the villages at risk (the great 'A'-shaped wall above Flateyri is visible from far off today), homes were relocated out of the dangerous zones and warning and evacuation systems were strengthened. Súðavík, in fact, rebuilt its residential area in a safer part of the fjord. These events are remembered plainly in both villages' memorials, and they remain part of the Westfjords' relationship with their magnificent but dangerous nature.
In recent decades, the region has also fought a battle over its future. The Hvalárvirkjun hydroelectric project, which planned to dam the rivers of the wild Strandir district (around Ófeigsfjörður and its waterfalls), pitted those who saw it as an opportunity for energy and jobs against those who argued that this is one of the last great untouched areas in Europe. The dispute, which reopened the old Icelandic debate about the value of untouched nature, ended with the project frozen. Today the Westfjords are betting more and more on respectful tourism as an economic way forward, trying to preserve exactly what makes them unique: their remote, wild and still almost intact character.