Iceland Travel Guide

Introduction to Iceland
Resting on the edge of the Arctic Circle and sitting atop one of the world’s most volcanically active hotspots, Iceland is nowadays thought of for its striking mix of magisterial glaciers, bubbling hot springs and rugged fjords, where activities such as hiking under the Midnight Sun are complemented by healthy doses of history and literature.

It’s misleading, then, that one of the country’s earliest visitors, the Viking Flóki Vilgerðarson, saw fit to choose a name for it that emphasized just one of these qualities, though perhaps he can be forgiven in part: having sailed here with hopes of starting a new life in this then uninhabited island, he endured a long hard winter in around 870 AD that killed off all his cattle. Hoping to spy out a more promising site for his farm he climbed a high mountain in the northwest of the country, only to be faced with a fjord full of drift ice. Bitterly disappointed, he named the place Ísland (Ice Land) and promptly sailed home for the positively balmy climes of Norway.

A few years later, however, Iceland was successfully settled and, despite the subsequent enthusiastic felling of trees for fuel and timber, visitors to the country today will see it in pretty much the same state as it was over a thousand years ago, with the coastal fringe, for example, dotted with sheep farms, a few score fishing villages and tiny hamlets – often no more than a collection of homesteads nestling around a wooden church. An Icelandic town, let alone a city, is still a rarity and until the twentieth century the entire nation numbered no more than sixty thousand. The country remains the most sparsely populated in Europe, with a population of just 296,000 – well over half of whom live down in the southwestern corner around the surprisingly cosmopolitan capital, Reykjavík. Akureyri, up on the north coast, is the only other decent-sized population centre outside the Greater Reykjavík area.
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