Iceland

Iceland is 103,000 km² — about a third larger than Czechia — with roughly 390,000 people, which is fewer than live in Brno and Ostrava combined. Two thirds of them live in the capital region. Outside it, the country runs to about 3.7 people per square kilometre, and large parts of the interior have none at all.

It sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge — the only substantial place on Earth where that mid-ocean spreading ridge rises above sea level — with a mantle plume underneath it for good measure. The North American and Eurasian plates are pulling apart beneath the island at around two centimetres a year, and everything else about Iceland follows from that: thirty-odd active volcanic systems, an eruption on average every four or five years, hot water under almost every town, and a landscape that is geologically brand new.

Around 11% of Iceland is under ice and a similar proportion is lava field. Only about a quarter of the country is vegetated at all, and there are almost no trees — the running joke is that if you get lost in an Icelandic forest, stand up. That is a consequence of the settlement: the island was perhaps a quarter to a third birch woodland in 874 and was almost entirely stripped within a few centuries.

Three UNESCO World Heritage sites: Þingvellir, where the world's oldest surviving parliament met from 930; Surtsey, an island that did not exist before 1963; and Vatnajökull National Park. That range — a parliament older than most European states, an island younger than most of the people reading this — is a fair summary of the place.

The name is what it says: Ísland, ice land, given by the Norse settler Hrafna-Flóki Vilgerðarson, who according to the Landnámabók spent a bad winter here, lost his livestock, climbed a mountain, saw a fjord full of drift ice and named the country after his worst day. Greenland's much friendlier name was given by Erik the Red as a piece of deliberate marketing. The two names have been the wrong way round ever since.

Iceland exists because two things coincide in one place: a divergent plate boundary, where the Atlantic sea floor is being manufactured, and a mantle plume pumping extra magma into it. Elsewhere the ridge is two or three kilometres under water. Here it is above the waves, and you can walk along it.

Iceland's defining hazard, and its defining scenery, is what happens when an active volcano sits under a glacier. Roughly a third of the country's eruptions since settlement have been subglacial, and they produce both ash clouds and floods.

Iceland is warmer than it has any right to be. Reykjavík sits at 64° north, level with Arctic Alaska and northern Siberia, and has an average January temperature of about 0 °C — milder than Prague. The Gulf Stream does that. What it does not do is make the weather pleasant: Iceland is windy, wet and violently changeable, and the local saying that if you don't like the weather you should wait five minutes is meant literally.

Iceland sits in the North Atlantic between about 63.5° and 66.5° north — the Arctic Circle clips the island of Grímsey off the north coast and misses the mainland. It is 800 km from Scotland, 970 km from Norway, and 290 km from Greenland at the nearest point.

Iceland is one of the very few countries whose settlement is a documented historical event rather than a prehistoric process. The Landnámabók — the Book of Settlements, compiled in the twelfth century — names around 430 original settlers, where they came from, where they landed and what land they claimed. Nothing comparable exists for anywhere else in Europe.

The traditional date is 874, when Ingólfur Arnarson is said to have thrown his high-seat pillars overboard and settled where they washed ashore, at a bay of steaming hot springs he called Reykjavík — smoky bay. Archaeology broadly supports the timing: a tephra layer from an eruption dated to 871±2 lies directly under the earliest occupation debris, which is about as clean a stratigraphic confirmation as history gets.

In 930 the settlers established an assembly on the plain at Þingvellir: the Alþingi, generally described as the oldest surviving parliament in the world. It met for two weeks each summer, and for the next three centuries Iceland ran as a commonwealth with no king and no executive — a legislature and a court system, and no one whose job it was to enforce a verdict. Enforcement was the winner's problem, which is why the sagas are what they are.

The Icelandic sagas are the country's largest contribution to world culture and are still under-read outside Scandinavia. Written mostly in the thirteenth century, in prose, in the vernacular, about events two or three hundred years earlier, they read astonishingly like modern novels: laconic, dialogue-driven, psychologically precise, with almost no authorial comment and a very dry sense of humour.

From the Old Covenant of 1262 to independence, Iceland was a possession — of Norway, and from 1380, when the Norwegian crown passed to Denmark, of Copenhagen. The period is remembered as an almost unbroken sequence of disasters, and the record largely supports that.

The nineteenth-century independence movement was led by Jón Sigurðsson, a scholar in Copenhagen, and was almost entirely constitutional — petitions, pamphlets and the restored Alþingi rather than rebellion. His birthday, 17 June, was chosen as the national day. Iceland got a constitution in 1874, home rule in 1904, and in 1918 became a fully sovereign kingdom in personal union with Denmark, with a treaty reviewable after twenty-five years.

Those twenty-five years expired in 1943, in the middle of a war in which Denmark was occupied by Germany and Iceland was occupied by the Allies. Iceland held a referendum, voted overwhelmingly to end the union, and declared a republic at Þingvellir on 17 June 1944 — the assembly plain of 930, chosen deliberately. King Christian X of Denmark, unable to attend or object, sent a telegram of congratulation, which was rather generous in the circumstances.

Between 1958 and 1976 Iceland fought three confrontations with the United Kingdom over fishing limits, and won all three. It is the only case in modern history of a state with no military whatsoever repeatedly facing down the Royal Navy — and it worked because Iceland understood exactly which lever it held.

Between 2003 and 2008 Iceland's three big banks — Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir — grew until their combined assets were around ten times the country's entire GDP, funded by wholesale borrowing and high-interest online deposit accounts sold across northern Europe. In the first week of October 2008 all three failed. It remains, relative to the size of the economy, the largest banking collapse in history.

The króna lost about half its value, inflation went past 18%, and unemployment went from near zero to 9%. Iceland took an IMF programme — the first Western European country to do so since Britain in 1976. What happened next is the part worth knowing.

The devalued króna made Iceland affordable at exactly the moment Eyjafjallajökull put it on every television in the world, and the government and airlines pushed hard on both. The result is one of the fastest tourism expansions ever recorded: from around 490,000 foreign visitors in 2010 to about 2.3 million by 2018, in a country of under 400,000 people.

Around 390,000 people, of whom about a fifth are now foreign-born — a very fast change, driven by tourism and construction, with Poles by far the largest group. Icelandic society is small enough that everyone is connected to everyone: there is a genealogy database, Íslendingabók, covering essentially the entire population back to settlement, and a companion app whose original selling point was checking that a prospective date is not a close cousin.

Iceland publishes more books per head than any other country and reads them. The jólabókaflóð — the Christmas book flood — is a genuine institution: almost the entire year's publishing output appears in the autumn, a catalogue is posted to every household, and books are the standard Christmas present, opened on the evening of the 24th and read that night.

You will read that "over half of Icelanders believe in elves". It is the single most repeated claim about the country and it is a distortion of what the surveys actually found.

The best-known study, by Terry Gunnell and Erlendur Haraldsson, asked Icelanders whether the existence of huldufólk — hidden people — was impossible, unlikely, possible, likely or certain. A majority declined to say impossible. Outright affirmative belief was in the region of a tenth. That is a very different sentence, and Icelanders find the international version tiresome — one folklorist's standard reply is that the same survey in any country would find plenty of people unwilling to rule out ghosts.

Iceland's land fauna is famously thin — the only native land mammal is the Arctic fox, which walked in over sea ice before the settlement. Everything else with four legs arrived on a boat: sheep, horses, cattle, mice, and reindeer introduced in the eighteenth century that now run wild in the east. There are no mosquitoes anywhere in Iceland, which is genuinely unusual at this latitude and is a real quality-of-life feature.

Icelandic cooking was, until about 1980, entirely a technology of preservation. Nothing grew; everything had to keep from autumn to spring. So things were smoked, salted, dried, pickled in whey, buried and fermented — and the results, which are now served as heritage food, are mostly not an attempt to be shocking. They are what a country with no salt mines, no spices and no fuel to spare had to do.

Since about 2000 Reykjavík has developed a serious restaurant scene built on the New Nordic principle of doing very good local ingredients simply, and it is expensive but not a rip-off. But the single most Icelandic thing to eat costs about a fifth as much and is sold from a hut.

Iceland voted for full prohibition in 1908 and enacted it in 1915. Wine came back in 1922 — because Spain, Iceland's main saltfish customer, threatened the trade unless Icelanders bought Spanish wine, which is one of the more effective pieces of commercial diplomacy on record. Spirits came back in 1935. And beer, on the theory that it was cheap enough to encourage everyday drunkenness, stayed illegal until 1 March 1989.

The world's northernmost capital of a sovereign state, and by the standards of capitals a very small one: about 140,000 in the city and 250,000 in the wider region, which is two thirds of the entire country. It is low, colourful, walkable in an afternoon, and it is not the reason to come to Iceland — but it is a genuinely pleasant two days and much more interesting than its critics allow.

Three sites within about 300 km of driving from Reykjavík, doable in a day and done by almost everyone: Þingvellir, Geysir and Gullfoss. It is the most crowded thing in Iceland and it is popular for a good reason — the three between them cover the rift, the geothermal field and the glacial river.

The stretch of Route 1 from Selfoss to Vík is the densest concentration of scenery in the country and the busiest road in Iceland after the airport run. Waterfalls off the old sea cliff on the left, black sand and Atlantic on the right, and glaciers behind both.

East of Vík the road crosses Skeiðarársandur, an enormous flat black desert built entirely from glacial flood debris, and then runs along the southern edge of Vatnajökull with ice tongues coming down to within a few kilometres of the road for a hundred kilometres. It is the most consistently astonishing stretch of the ring road.

Past the east fjords the ring road reaches the north, which most visitors never get to and which contains a good share of the country's best things. Beyond that lie the Westfjords and the Snæfellsnes peninsula, and inland the empty highlands.

If there is one habit worth stealing from Iceland it is this. Almost every settlement in the country, however small, has a geothermal swimming pool — outdoor, heated, open from early morning to late evening, year-round, and costing roughly the price of a coffee. This is where the country actually socialises, and it is a far better experience than any of the marketed lagoons.

Iceland has no railways, so almost every independent visitor drives. The roads are good and the traffic is light, and the danger is entirely environmental: wind, ice, blowing sand, single-lane bridges and the fact that the scenery is more interesting than the road.

The other hazards, briefly: sneaker waves at Reynisfjara and other south-coast beaches, which have killed several visitors; walking on a glacier without a guide, rope and crampons; approaching a crevasse or an ice cave alone; and hypothermia, which is the commonest search-and-rescue call and does not need a cold day, only wet and wind. Iceland's rescue service, ICE-SAR, is entirely volunteer and will come for you free of charge, which is a reason to be considerate rather than casual.

Keflavík (KEF), 50 km south-west of Reykjavík, handles essentially all international traffic. Its whole business model is being the mid-point of the North Atlantic: Icelandair built the airline around free stopovers of up to a week between Europe and North America at no extra fare, which is the cheapest way anyone has ever visited Iceland.

Iceland is expensive. It is consistently in the top three or four most expensive countries in the world, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. The causes are real — everything is imported, the population is tiny, wages are high and taxes are high — and there are genuine ways to cut it in half.

For Czech travellers: the Czech Republic has no embassy in Reykjavík — Iceland is covered from the Czech Embassy in Oslo, with an honorary consul in Reykjavík. Note the contacts from mzv.cz before you go rather than looking for them from a lay-by. MZV ČR issues no travel warning for Iceland beyond ordinary caution, and registration in DROZD is free and genuinely useful in a country where a road can close behind you.

Iceland has a problem that most countries would envy and that is nonetheless real: it has become so photographed that people arrive with the pictures already in their heads and spend the trip collecting them. Kirkjufell, the Blue Lagoon, the black beach, the ice lagoon, all shot from the same three spots, all with a queue. Every one of those places is genuinely worth seeing. But the country is far bigger and far emptier than that corridor, and almost nobody goes to the other 90% of it.

So the honest advice is: do the famous things, early in the morning, and then get away from them. Give the north and the east fjords a proper share of the trip. Go to the Westfjords if you have ten days, because they have a fraction of the traffic and are arguably the best of it. Swim in the municipal pool in whatever town you are in rather than in a marketed lagoon; it costs a coffee, it is where the country actually is, and the shower rule is not personal.

Two practical things carry more weight than everything else on this page. Check road.is and vedur.is every single morning — this is not caution, it is how Icelanders live, and the closures are absolute. And budget properly rather than being shocked: the country is expensive, the savings are real if you cook and shop at Bónus and travel in the shoulder season, and every single one of the great sights is free.

On the images

The photographs here are illustrative reconstructions rather than documentary images, and this set is broadly accurate — Þingvellir's rift, Strokkur mid-eruption, Surtsey's crater, Jökulsárlón, Reynisfjara's stacks and the Icelandic horses are all recognisably themselves. Where an image diverges the caption says so: the Skógafoss picture puts the fall in a gorge that does not exist and pushes the moss to acid yellow, as does the Kirkjufell one; the aurora is more saturated than the naked eye sees; the lamb's interior is an impossible magenta; the plokkfiskur is a fillet where the dish is a mash; and the labels on the beer and Brennivín bottles are generated lettering rather than real text — the real Brennivín label is black. One supplied recipe image was left out entirely: it showed rúgbrauð as a pale, dry, crumbly loaf, and Icelandic rye bread is near-black, dense and sticky — wrong on the one feature that defines it.