West Iceland & the Westfjords

Iceland was named here. The Norse explorer Flóki Vilgerðarson wintered at Vatnsfjörður on the southern shore of the Westfjords, saw from a mountain a fjord choked with drift ice and gave the island its name. Among the settlers who followed was Skallagrímur Kveldúlfsson, who farmed at Borg beside the present Borgarnes; his son Egill, warrior and poet, is the hero of Egils saga. Eiríkur the Red farmed at Eiríksstaðir in Haukadalur before he was outlawed and sailed from Breiðafjörður to found the Greenland colony around 985, and Laxdæla saga, set in the Dalir valleys, ends at Helgafell near Stykkishólmur, where its heroine Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir is buried.

Snorri Sturluson, chieftain and author of the Prose Edda and Heimskringla, lived at Reykholt in Borgarfjörður from 1206 until agents of the Norwegian king killed him in his house there in September 1241. Under foreign crowns the wealth was dried fish: fishermen rowed out each spring from stations such as Dritvík beneath Snæfellsjökull, and the Danish monopoly of 1602–1786 left the timber warehouses that still stand in Ísafjörður. The Westfjords also saw the killing of Basque whalers on a sheriff's orders in 1615, the last documented massacre in Icelandic history.

Jón Sigurðsson, leader of the independence movement, was born at Hrafnseyri on Arnarfjörður on 17 June 1811, the date now kept as the national day. Ísafjörður grew through the early 20th century as a centre of fish processing, and lost people after the fishing restrictions of the 1980s. Hornstrandir's last farmers left in the 1950s, and avalanches killed fourteen people at Súðavík in January 1995 and twenty at Flateyri that October. Tunnels have since redrawn the map: around Ísafjörður in 1996, under Hvalfjörður in 1998 and to Dýrafjörður in 2020.

The west is saga country and treats the texts as local history. Borgarnes tells Egils saga in its Settlement Centre, and Reykholt keeps Snorralaug, the pool where Snorri bathed. Snæfellsjökull carries a second literature — Jules Verne sent his travellers down its crater in Journey to the Centre of the Earth in 1864, and Halldór Laxness set Under the Glacier in its shadow — along with Bárður Snæfellsás, the half-troll guardian of the peninsula.

Westfjorders, Vestfirðingar, are regarded by other Icelanders as a stubborn breed apart, shaped by isolation, and some of them keep a plain vowel before ng and nk where the rest of the country uses a diphthong. The old reputation for sorcery, recalled by the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft at Hólmavík, sits alongside newer traditions: Ísafjörður's Ski Week at Easter and, the same weekend, the rock festival Aldrei fór ég suður ("I never went south"), founded by the musician Mugison and his father in 2004.

Fishing villages mark Sjómannadagurinn, Seamen's Day, in June with rowing races and speeches, and Stykkishólmur remembers its merchants with Danish Days in August. Eider farming is the quietest craft: on Vigur, where some 3,500 pairs nest each year, and on other islands the down is gathered from the nests. Immigrants, Poles the largest group among them, now make up a large part of the workforce in many fishing villages.

About 17,500 people live in West Iceland and some 7,200 in the Westfjords, together under seven per cent of the country on nearly a fifth of its land. Akranes, a fishing and factory town across the bay from Reykjavík, is the largest settlement and increasingly a commuter suburb since the Hvalfjörður tunnel went toll-free in 2018; many of its workers staff the aluminium smelter at Grundartangi. Borgarnes, Stykkishólmur, Ólafsvík and Grundarfjörður are small towns of a few thousand people or fewer. Ísafjörður, with about 2,700, is the capital of the Westfjords, with the hospital, a music school and the University Centre, and Árneshreppur in Strandir, with around fifty residents, is the least populated municipality in the country.

Fishing and fish processing still pay the wages, but the Westfjords lost many of their people after fishing quotas, introduced in 1984 and later made tradable, let catch rights be sold out of the villages. What has turned the numbers around in Arnarfjörður, Tálknafjörður and Patreksfjörður is salmon farming in sea cages, an industry that has brought jobs and young families and a national argument about wild salmon. Ísafjörður's Kerecis, which makes wound dressings from cod skin, was sold to a Danish firm for up to 1.3 billion dollars in 2023, and the town's harbour now takes large cruise ships each summer. Borgarfjörður has the Agricultural University at Hvanneyri and hundreds of summer houses owned by families from the capital.

Preserved fish is the signature. At Bjarnarhöfn on Snæfellsnes one family still cures hákarl, Greenland shark pressed and fermented for six to twelve weeks and then hung in an open shed for four or five months, and explains the process in a small museum. The Westfjords claim the country's best harðfiskur, wind-dried haddock or wolffish torn into strips and eaten with butter, and kæst skata, fermented skate with an ammonia reek, is eaten across the country on 23 December, St Þorlákur's Day. Tjöruhúsið in Ísafjörður, an 18th-century tar store of 1781, is now a restaurant.

Breiðafjörður supplies scallops, long dredged by Stykkishólmur's boats, and near Reykhólar a small company makes sea salt by evaporating seawater with geothermal heat.

Inland the produce is lamb and dairy. The dairy plant at Búðardalur is a major local employer, and late August brings families onto the Westfjords' hillsides to pick aðalbláber, bilberries, and crowberries.

Borgarnes, an hour north of Reykjavík, has the Settlement Centre, with exhibitions on the settlement and Egils saga, and Borg, Egill's farm, on its outskirts; on the way, the head of Hvalfjörður hides Glymur, a 198-metre fall. Up the Borgarfjörður valley come Deildartunguhver, Europe's most powerful hot spring, Snorri's pool at Reykholt, and Hraunfossar, where springs pour from beneath a lava field into the Hvítá for nearly a kilometre. Húsafell, in birch woods at the road's end, is the base for the Víðgelmir lava cave and for the man-made ice tunnels of Langjökull, the country's second-largest ice cap.

The Snæfellsnes peninsula is often called Iceland in miniature. Its south shore has the beach at Ytri Tunga, the church at Búðir and the villages of Arnarstapi and Hellnar; the tip is Snæfellsjökull National Park, with the Lóndrangar sea stacks, the black pebbles of Djúpalónssandur and the Vatnshellir lava tube beneath the 1,446-metre glacier; and the north shore has Kirkjufell above Grundarfjörður and the painted timber houses of Stykkishólmur, from whose harbour the Baldur ferry crosses Breiðafjörður by way of Flatey.

In the Westfjords the ferry lands within reach of the red-gold sands of Rauðasandur and the Látrabjarg bird cliffs, 14 kilometres long and up to 441 metres high, where puffins nest within arm's reach at Iceland's westernmost point. Dynjandi spreads 100 metres down a mountainside on Arnarfjörður above a staircase of smaller falls, and the road continues past Hrafnseyri and Þingeyri to Ísafjörður, with its 18th-century Neðstikaupstaður warehouses, the Ósvör fishing station and the view from Bolafjall at Bolungarvík, and boats to the eider island of Vigur. Boats also cross to Hornstrandir, a roadless reserve of 580 square kilometres where Arctic foxes patrol beneath the 500-metre Hornbjarg cliffs. The Strandir coast road passes Hólmavík's sorcery museum and the disused herring factory at Djúpavík and ends at the Krossneslaug pool on the shore at Norðurfjörður.