Siglufjörður

The fjord belonged to the old district of Siglunes, named after the farm at its mouth, which was long the main estate of the area and a large fishing station. Trade began in the district in 1788, and Siglufjörður became a licensed trading place in 1818, when only eight people lived at the trading post itself. Before the herring came, the town was best known for shark fishing. In April 1919 an avalanche killed nine people in a small settlement on the east side of the fjord, one of several that took 18 lives in the district that spring.

Norwegians began fishing for herring off the north coast in 1903, and Icelanders soon followed. With its fine natural harbour close to the fishing grounds, Siglufjörður became the herring town: it had several herring factories, among them the largest in the country, and more than 20 salting stations at the height of the boom. The population grew from 146 in 1901 to about 3,000 in 1950, when it was the fifth-largest town in Iceland, and in some years herring exports from Siglufjörður made up more than a fifth of all Iceland's exports. Siglufjörður gained town status in 1918.

The catch failed for several years in the 1950s, and the herring vanished from the northern grounds in 1964 and from Icelandic waters altogether in 1968. The salting stations and factories closed, many people left, and trawlers, capelin and later shrimp processing took over. In 2006 the town merged with Ólafsfjörður to form Fjallabyggð, and in 2010 the Héðinsfjörður tunnels opened a year-round road east to Ólafsfjörður; until then the single-lane Strákagöng tunnel of 1967, to the west, had been the town's only road link open all year. In January 2021 an avalanche destroyed the town's ski area.

Siglufjörður's cultural life rests on two inheritances. The first is the herring: the Herring Era Museum, which opened in 1994 in a salting station abandoned after the collapse, has become Iceland's largest maritime museum and the only Icelandic museum to have won the European Museum Award, and every August bank holiday weekend the town remembers the boom years with its herring festival.

The second is folk music. Bjarni Þorsteinsson became parish priest in 1888 and served for half a century; he is remembered above all for collecting Iceland's old folk songs, many of them nearly forgotten, and publishing them between 1906 and 1909. A folk-music centre in his name opened in 2006, a hundred years after his collection first appeared, and a folk-music festival is held every July. Poetry has a home here too: Ljóðasetur Íslands, a centre for Icelandic verse, was opened in 2011 by the former president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, and the poetry festival Glóð has been held every year since 2007.

The town has a second life on screen and on the page. Baltasar Kormákur's television series Trapped was filmed almost entirely here, and Ragnar Jónasson's Dark Iceland crime novels are set in the town.

About 1,165 people lived in Siglufjörður in 2024, far fewer than at the town's peak around 1950. Together with Ólafsfjörður, 15 kilometres away through the tunnels, it forms the municipality of Fjallabyggð. The town remains dependent on the fishing industries, and the government has tried to slow the decline in population by improving roads and promoting tourism; in recent years the fall has slowed.

The fjord is small and narrow, ringed by high, steep mountains, with very good natural shelter for boats but little flat land, so the town quickly ran short of room as it grew, and avalanche danger is high in many parts of the fjord. For most of its history nearly everything arrived by sea; the first road over the mountain pass was open only a few months of the year, and the tunnels have transformed daily life by making Akureyri an hour's drive away.

The year swings between extremes of light. The sun does not set from 9 June to 1 July, and the summer festivals bring crowds to the harbour. At the December solstice daylight lasts under three hours, and the town turns inward to work, school and the long winter.

Herring built the town: salting it was the work of the old salting stations, and herring is still among the fish Icelanders eat most, alongside haddock, plaice, halibut and shrimp. One small restaurant on Aðalgata serves only fish and chips and fish stew. Before the herring era, the town was best known for shark fishing; fermented shark, hákarl, is most often served at the midwinter þorrablót feast.

Icelandic staples fill the rest of the table: hangikjöt, smoked lamb; harðfiskur, fish dried by cold air and wind and traditionally eaten with butter; and skyr, which has the consistency of strained yogurt but is classed as a fresh sour milk cheese. Laufabrauð, the thin patterned leaf bread fried at Christmas, began in the north and is still made by families in the weeks before the holiday.

Siglufjörður has its own brewery, Segull 67, with a taproom in the town. The town's handful of restaurants is broader than its size suggests, with seafood dining and even a Moroccan kitchen.