Country guide

Iceland

Fire, ice and the world’s quietest light

Iceland is landscape as theatre — volcanoes, glaciers, geysers and black-sand beaches arranged across an island the size of a small state. It is safe, family-friendly and astonishingly easy to drive, with a hot spring never far from the road.

June – September

Akureyri & the North

A gentle northern capital by the fjord

Akureyri is Iceland’s second city, though “town” fits better — a cluster of colourful houses beside a long fjord, backed by snow-flecked mountains and warmed by the Gulf Stream. The north is quieter, greener and gentler than the tourist-thick south, with whale-watching, waterfalls and the odd turf-roofed church around every corner.

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June – September; February – March for auroras

Reykjavík & the Golden Circle

Geysers, rift valleys and a cosy capital

Reykjavík is a capital on a human scale — colourfully roofed, walkable and warm-hearted, with the sea at the end of every street. Around it curls the Golden Circle: a gentle day loop of erupting geyser, thundering waterfall and the rift valley where two continents pull apart.

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June – September

The South Coast

Black sand, glaciers and roaring falls

Iceland’s south coast is the country’s greatest hits reel — waterfall after waterfall, a black-sand beach of basalt columns, a glacier lagoon of drifting icebergs, and the road to the coast kept company by volcanoes and ice caps. It is busy in summer, but the sights are big enough to share.

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June – August

The Westfjords

Iceland’s wild, road-less-visited edge

The Westfjords are the Iceland that the brochures forget — a great claw of fjords and table-top mountains jutting into the North Atlantic, with a single road looping its edge and almost no one on it. Cliffs teem with puffins, waterfalls plunge straight into the sea, and the light over the fjords at midnight is a thing of its own.

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