Peaks to Palaces

There’s a stretch of Iceland’s Ring Road where the vegetation simply stops. One minute you’re driving past green wetlands and grazing sheep, the next you’re pulling into a barren, steaming, sulfur-stained moonscape where the ground hisses and bubbles like it’s alive. Locals call it “Hell’s Kitchen.” The rest of us call it Hverir — and it might be the single strangest place you’ll stand on your entire Iceland trip.

What Is Hverir (Námaskarð)?

Hverir sits at the foot of Mt. Námafjall in North Iceland, just a few kilometers east of Lake Mývatn on Route 1. You’ll see it referred to interchangeably as Hverir, Námaskarð, Námafjall Hverir, or Hverarönd — they’re all pointing at the same high-temperature geothermal field, one of the most intense and accessible in the country.

No hiking is required to feel the full effect. Pull off the Ring Road, step out of the car, and you’re immediately surrounded by hissing steam vents (fumaroles), bubbling grey mud pots, and ground streaked in shades of yellow, orange, red, and white from mineral deposits. The Icelandic nickname for the area, eldhús djöfulsins — “the Devil’s Kitchen” — is not an exaggeration once you’re standing in it. Steam drifts across the barren ground right where Hverir meets the Ring Road — you’ll spot it long before you arrive.

The Sulfur That Armed Medieval Europe

Behind the surreal colors is a genuinely surprising piece of history: Hverir wasn’t just a geological curiosity to the people who lived near it. For centuries, it was an industrial site.

Sulfur has probably been extracted from the Námafjall area since as early as the thirteenth century. Back then, sulfur was one of the most valuable commodities you could get your hands on, because it was a key ingredient in gunpowder. At the height of demand, a large share of the sulfur used in gunpowder production across medieval and early modern Europe came directly from mines around Námaskarð — meaning this quiet, remote patch of North Iceland was, for a stretch of history, genuinely strategically important to armies and empires that most Icelanders would never see.

The trade eventually caught the attention of foreign powers: by the sixteenth century, the local sulfur deposits had come under the control of the Danish Crown, which controlled Iceland at the time. Miners worked the deposits in brutal conditions — unstable, superheated ground, choking sulfurous gas, and difficult terrain that made transporting the material out of North Iceland a serious logistical challenge in its own right. Extraction continued with varying intensity into the nineteenth century, with a brief attempt to revive mining around 1940.

Eventually, gunpowder stopped being the point. As Iceland’s relationship with its geothermal landscape shifted from extraction to energy, places like Hverir became valuable for an entirely different reason: geothermal power now heats the vast majority of Icelandic homes, and the same volcanic forces that once produced sulfur for war are now a cornerstone of the country’s renewable energy.

The name itself still carries the memory: Námaskarð translates roughly to “Mine Pass” — a nod to a few hundred years of people working in one of the most hostile environments in Iceland, long before anyone came here to take photos.

What to See at Hverir

• The fumaroles — steam vents where volcanic gas escapes through cracks in the earth, some loud enough to hear before you spot them. On calm days the steam rises straight up in tall columns; on windy days it sweeps sideways across the whole field.
• The mud pots (solfataras) — thick, grey, boiling mud that pops and bubbles constantly. Mesmerizing to watch, and one of the best photo subjects in the area.

• The mineral-stained ground — bright yellow elemental sulfur crusts around the most active vents, with rust-orange and white patches from iron oxide and silica deposits nearby.
• Mt. Námafjall — the orange-toned rhyolite mountain towering over the field. If you have extra time, a hike up gives you a sweeping view down over the entire geothermal area and Lake Mývatn beyond it.
• The two 1950s boreholes — a pair of especially striking fumaroles drilled during a mid-century sulfur exploration effort, among 16 wells sunk in the area at the time.

Recommended time: 30–60 minutes for the main field on the marked walkways; 2–3 hours if you add the Námafjall hike.

Safety note: stick to the marked paths. The crust around fumaroles and mud pots can look solid while hiding scalding mud or steam just beneath the surface, and severe burns are a real risk if you wander off-trail. Try to stay upwind of the strongest vents too — the sulfurous gas is unpleasant at best and irritating to breathe at worst.

Parking Fee at Hverir

Hverir charges 1,200 ISK for parking, payable through the EasyPark app. There’s no separate entrance fee to walk the geothermal field itself — the parking charge is the only cost of a visit. As with most managed car parks in Iceland these days, pay before you set off on foot rather than after; retroactive payment usually comes with a penalty.

Hverir sits right on the Diamond Circle route and pairs easily with nearby Krafla volcano and the Mývatn Nature Baths, making it a natural stop whether you’re doing a full day loop or just passing through on the Ring Road.

Seyðisfjörður is the Most Photographed Town in East Iceland, and there is a reason for it.

After two rainy days in a row, Seyðisfjörður finally gave us sun — and it turned out to be the perfect town for it. We woke up to the ship easing into the fjord, and the first thing that hit me wasn’t the colorful houses or the church everyone talks about; it was the waterfall. There’s a huge one sitting right above the town, practically part of the skyline, tumbling down the mountainside as if it’s built into the place. Waking up to that view, after grey skies at the glacial lagoon and again at Mývatn, felt like Iceland had finally decided to show us its bright side.

We got off on the first tender so we’d have the town mostly to ourselves before the crowds came ashore, and just wandered. Seyðisfjörður is small enough that “wandering” is basically the whole itinerary — it’s a town of roughly 676 people tucked at the end of a fjord, ringed by steep mountains, and every direction you look has either colorful timber houses, cascading water, or both.

Rainbow Street and the Blue Church

This is the image everyone has of Seyðisfjörður before they’ve even been there — a street painted in rainbow stripes leading straight up to a vivid blue church. The church itself was actually built in Norway back in 1894 and shipped to Iceland in pieces, which explains the distinctly Norwegian-style timber architecture that runs through the whole town. The rainbow street below it (officially Norðurgata) was painted as a community project and has become the town’s unofficial symbol. Getting there early on the first tender paid off — by the time we looped back through later, the street was noticeably busier.

The Ferry Town

Wandering further along the harbor, we noticed a long line of RVs rolling off a large ship docked nearby, and it took us a minute to place it — Seyðisfjörður is the arrival port for the Smyril Line’s Norröna ferry, which connects Iceland to the Faroe Islands and Denmark. It’s the only sea link between Iceland and mainland Europe, so for a lot of travelers with their own vehicles, this sleepy little fjord town is their actual entry point into the country. Watching a ferry’s worth of camper vans unload right into this tiny, colorful village was a strange, fun contrast — modern road trips pouring into a town that looks like it hasn’t changed in a century.

There’s a bit of irony in arriving here by cruise ship, too: after years of large ships bringing waves of day-trippers into such a small harbor, Seyðisfjörður became the first town in Iceland to put limits on cruise tourism, capping how many visitors could come ashore at once to keep the town from being overwhelmed. Taking the first tender in suddenly felt like good timing, not just preference.

A Fjord With a Long Memory

For a town this small, Seyðisfjörður carries a surprising amount of history. Archaeologists have dated the remains of an old farmstead here to the 10th century, with even older burial finds pointing to settlement in the 800s—making this one of the earliest-inhabited corners of Iceland, according to legend, first claimed by a settler named Bjólfur, after whom the mountain looming over the town is named. The town itself didn’t really take shape until the mid-1800s, when Norwegian herring fishermen settled the fjord, which explains why so much of the architecture still looks transplanted from Norway rather than native Icelandic. A Norwegian-born merchant named Otto Wathne became something of a local legend in that era, and the town still has a monument to him. The fjord’s naturally sheltered harbor also meant it was often first in line for new technology — Iceland’s first telephone line reportedly ran through here before reaching the rest of the country — and during World War II, the town served as one of the Allies’ main bases in Iceland.

More recently, in December 2020, Seyðisfjörður was hit by a series of landslides — including the largest ever recorded to strike an urban area in Iceland. No one was killed, but over a dozen buildings were destroyed, some historic timber houses among them, and the town was cut off for a time while it recovered. Walking those same streets in the sun, it was hard to picture, but it added a layer of resilience to a town that already felt like it punched above its weight.

Around Town

Beyond the church and the street, Seyðisfjörður has a genuine creative pulse. The Skaftfell Art Center anchors the town’s art scene, and out along the water there’s the Tvísöngur sound sculpture — a set of five interconnected concrete domes designed around Iceland’s tradition of five-tone harmony, each dome resonating with a different note when you stand inside it. There are a couple of other public art pieces worth hunting down too: a sculpture marking the laying of Iceland’s first undersea telegraph cable in 1906, which effectively connected the country to the rest of the world for the first time, and another piece the town commissioned as a gift to itself for its 100th anniversary back in 1995. The whole town has apparently been a filming location too, including a scene from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which honestly checks out — it does have that “too picturesque to be real” quality on camera.

The Waterfall Behind Town

That waterfall we spotted from the ship has a name — Búðarárfoss —, and it’s an easy 5-to-10-minute walk up from the town center, with a great view back down over the harbor and the rainbow street from above. For anyone with more time, a longer trail follows the Fjarðará River upstream through a small forested stretch, passing several more falls (the river reportedly has around 25 of them scattered along its length) on the way to the larger Gufufoss waterfall further up the valley.

From Seyðisfjörður: Stuðlagil Canyon

After an hour of roaming the town, we booked a Viator day tour out to Stuðlagil Canyon and its waterfalls — one of East Iceland’s most striking natural sites, and dramatic enough that it deserves its own post. We used this Viator tour from Seyðisfjörður to Stuðlagil Canyon

Things to Do Around Seyðisfjörður

If you have more time here than a short shore excursion, this little fjord town has more range than it first lets on:

• Visit Gufufoss– Situated on the outskirts of Seyðisfjörður, Gufufoss stands 88ft tall. It gets its name from the Icelandic “gufu”, meaning steam, referring to the water spray caused by the plunging falls. We visited as part of this Viator tour on our way to Studlagil Canyon.

• Walk the Fossastígur trail — an easy riverside path from town leading up through forest toward Fjarðarsel, home to Iceland’s oldest still-operating power plant (1913), with berries lining the trail in late summer.
• Hike Vestdalur valley — a longer trail past waterfalls and up to a small lake, known for plant life you won’t see elsewhere in the area; a longer route continues on toward the neighboring Borgarfjörður valley.
• Climb one of the peaks flanking the fjord — Mt. Bjólfur (1,085 m) to the west and Strandartindur (1,010 m) to the east are the two most prominent summits, and the local hiking club has set up logbook boxes on seven surrounding peaks as part of a self-guided “Mountain Club” challenge, complete with a punch-card map available from the tourist information center.
• Follow the trail toward Gullþúfa — starting from Sörlastaðir along the Sörlastaðaá river, this route climbs to the highest point south of town.
• Visit Skaftfell Bistro — housed in the same building as the art center, and a good stop for a meal with a side of local art.
• Cool off (or warm up) at the pool — the town has a public swimming pool and hot tubs on Suðurgata, plus a nine-hole golf course at Hagavöllur for anyone traveling with clubs.
• Time it for the LungA Arts Festival — if you’re visiting in July, this international arts festival takes over the town for a week and draws artists from all over.
• Take a day trip further afield — Stuðlagil Canyon and the Vök Baths near Egilsstaðir are both popular longer excursions from Seyðisfjörður, and in winter, East Iceland’s valleys are one of the only places in the country where wild reindeer still roam.
• Drive (or admire) the Fjarðarheiði mountain pass — Route 93 between Egilsstaðir and Seyðisfjörður climbs to around 600–630 meters and is considered one of Iceland’s most scenic drives, with waterfalls cascading on both sides of the descent into town.

Getting to Seyðisfjörður

Most visitors arrive one of two ways:

• By road: Seyðisfjörður sits 27 km (about 30 minutes) from Egilsstaðir via Route 93, over the Fjarðarheiði pass. It’s a spectacular drive, but check the road.is in winter — the pass can close in bad weather.
• By sea: Besides cruise ship tenders like ours, this is the only Icelandic port served by an international ferry — the Smyril Line’s Norröna, arriving weekly from Tórshavn (Faroe Islands) and Hirtshals (Denmark), a popular option for travelers bringing their own car or RV into Iceland.

There’s no direct bus service into town from outside East Iceland — Egilsstaðir is the regional hub for buses and flights, with a short taxi or drive from there.

Whatever brings you here, give the town at least a couple of unhurried hours. The whole point of Seyðisfjörður seems to be slowing down enough to actually look at it.

Of everything I saw in Iceland, this is the moment that made me go “WOW” — the glacial lagoon at Jökulsárlón.

By the time we got to Glacial Lagoon, we’d already had a few days of big Icelandic moments. A South Coast tour had checked off waterfalls and black sand beaches. We’d been out whale watching. We’d sailed toward Heimaey hoping to see puffins, but the weather had other plans — the boat never docked, and we spent the whole day out at sea instead, puffin-less. So when the day came to visit the glacial lagoon from Djúpivogur, I wasn’t expecting much. It started raining before we’d even left, and I’d more or less made peace with a quiet, gray day.

Then we arrived, and I honestly couldn’t believe what I was looking at.

I’d seen glaciers before. I’d even walked on the Athabasca Glacier in Banff, so it wasn’t as if ice was new to me. But this was something else entirely. It wasn’t one solid sheet of ice to walk across — it was hundreds of broken chunks, scattered across a still, dark lagoon, each one catching light in a different way. Some were nearly clear, some a deep glacial blue, some streaked black and white where volcanic ash and sediment had been folded into the ice over centuries. The volcanic landscape doesn’t just sit near the lagoon — it shapes it, staining the ice with these strange, striped patterns you won’t see anywhere else.

Diamond Beach

And then there’s Diamond Beach, the black sand shoreline just across Route 1 from the lagoon, where the current carries smaller iceberg chunks out to sea and the waves wash them back onto the sand. Against the black volcanic sand, the ice looks exactly like scattered diamonds — hence the name. If you want to actually see a beach full of them, timing matters: go at low tide. At high tide, a lot of that ice gets pulled back out or covered, and you’re left with far fewer “diamonds” on the sand.

What stuck with me most, though, was how the rain made it better, not worse. The gray sky flattened the light just enough that the blues in the ice seemed to glow from within instead of glaring in the sun. It felt less like a postcard and more like standing somewhere that wasn’t entirely real. Surreal is overused, but I don’t have a better word for it.

Visiting the Glacial Lagoon from Reykjavík

Jökulsárlón sits in southeast Iceland, right on the Ring Road (Route 1), inside Vatnajökull National Park — fed by the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier, part of Vatnajökull, Europe’s largest ice cap. It’s about 378 km (roughly 240 miles) east of Reykjavík, a drive of around 4.5 to 5 hours on the Ring Road, and the distance means it’s not really a there-and-back-in-a-day trip from the capital.

Getting there:

• Self-drive: Leave central Reykjavík on Route 49, merge onto Route 1 heading southeast, and stay on it for around 375 km until you see the signposted turn for the lagoon, which leads straight into the car park. The drive itself is one of Iceland’s best, passing Seljalandsfoss, Skógafoss, the Vík black sand coast, and Skaftafell along the way.
• Guided tour: Most visitors combine it with a South Coast day tour from Reykjavík, or see it as part of a full Ring Road circuit. Since we came in from Djúpivogur on the east side, we approached from the opposite direction — a good reminder that the lagoon works as a stop whether you’re circling the Ring Road clockwise or counter-clockwise.
• Public transport: There’s no public bus service to Jökulsárlón — it’s only reachable by car or organized tour.

Once you’re there:

• The lagoon itself is free to walk along, and you don’t need to book anything to see the icebergs from shore. Boat tours (amphibious trucks or Zodiacs) run seasonally and get you out among the ice for a closer look, with the option to sail right up near the icebergs.
• Diamond Beach is a two-minute walk or drive across Route 1 from the lagoon car park. Check the tide times before you go — low tide is when the most ice piles up on the sand.
• A minimum visit is about 1.5 hours for the lagoon and Diamond Beach together; budget 2.5–3 hours if you want a boat tour too, and closer to 4 if you’re stopping for food at the small café by the car park.
• Stay well back from the water’s edge — waves can arrive without warning on these beaches, and the ice can shift suddenly.

When to go: The lagoon is worth visiting any time of year. Summer brings boat tours and long daylight; winter brings the chance to pair it with ice cave tours and a shot at the northern lights. We went when the weather wasn’t cooperating at all, and it still turned out to be one of the best days of the whole trip. If the forecast looks gray, don’t let that stop you — it might just make the ice glow a little bluer.

What makes Jökulsárlón and Diamond Beach so unique? I got curious about why I’d never seen anything like it before, even at other glaciers — and it turns out the lagoon is rarer than it looks. Unlike most glacial lakes, which are landlocked and just sit there melting, Jökulsárlón connects to the Atlantic through a short tidal channel, so seawater actually mixes with the meltwater and the tides push in and out every day. That connection is the whole reason Diamond Beach exists at all: icebergs don’t just melt in place; they drift toward the sea, ground near the channel mouth, and eventually break through, where the waves wash the smaller pieces back onto the black sand next door. Landlocked lakes have nowhere for the ice to go, so there’s no “beach” stage anywhere else. Add in the fact that the lagoon is Iceland’s deepest lake at nearly 250 meters, letting massive icebergs — some over a thousand years old — float freely instead of grounding out, and that the black-and-white streaks in the ice are volcanic ash compressed into the glacier over centuries, and you get a combination of tidal lagoon, volcanic terrain, and an exposed coastline that barely exists anywhere else on Earth. It also helps that the whole thing is young: a century ago none of this existed, and the lagoon has quadrupled in size since the 1970s as the glacier keeps retreating, so you’re really watching a landscape still in the middle of forming itself.