Reykjavik: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
In 1900 Iceland was the poorest country in Western Europe: a Danish colony of 78,000 people with no roads, no towns worth the name, and turf houses. What changed it was a decked trawler. Within two generations the fish paid for everything you are about to walk past, and Iceland went from the bottom of Europe to the top of it. Two hours, flat, and the wind comes off the water.
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A short history of Reykjavik
According to the "Book of Settlements", the first permanent settler in Iceland, Ingólfur Arnarson, set up his farm here around 874 and called the place "Smoky Bay" because of the steam from the hot springs. For centuries it was a farm rather than a town, and only in 1786 did Reykjavík receive town rights. In 1944 Iceland was declared an independent republic, with Reykjavík as its capital. In 1986 Reagan and Gorbachev met at Höfði House, and in the same year Hallgrímskirkja church was completed after 41 years of construction. Today about two thirds of the country's population lives in the city and its suburbs.
The ten best sights in Reykjavik
1HallgrímskirkjaThe tower is €10 and it is the only high view in town
2HarpaFree to walk into, and the glass was designed by an artist
3National Museum€15, and it covers 1,200 years in one floor
4Settlement ExhibitionA real Viking longhouse, left where it was dug up
5HafnarhúsThe art museum in the old port warehouse, €19 for three sites
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6Kjarvalsstaðir
One painter who made Icelanders see their own lava
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7Ásmundarsafn
A sculptor who built his own white dome to live in
8Einar Jónsson MuseumThe garden behind it is free and full of his bronzes
9Maritime MuseumA coastguard ship you board, and the cod wars explained
10Whales of Iceland23 life-size whales hanging in a warehouse, €32
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What is an audio walk?
Tours in Reykjavik →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Reykjavik:
Free walking tours in Reykjavik
Built out of fish
In 1900 Iceland was the poorest country in Western Europe: a Danish colony of 78,000 people with no roads, no towns worth the name, and turf houses. What changed it was a decked trawler. Within two generations the fish paid for everything you are about to walk past, and Iceland went from the bottom of Europe to the top of it. Two hours, flat, and the wind comes off the water.
- Old Harbour · Reykjavík had no harbour at all until 1917 — boats were rowed ashore and goods carried through the surf. The breakwater here was the single largest thing Iceland had ever built, and it is the reason a town existed instead of a trading post.
- Maritime Museum · Between 1958 and 1976 Iceland fought Britain three times over fishing rights, without a navy. Icelandic coastguard boats cut the trawl cables of British ships; Britain sent frigates. Iceland threatened to close the NATO base, and won all three times.
- Grandi · This spit was built out of rubble to hold the freezing plants, and until the 1990s it smelled of fishmeal all day. The plants moved out, the buildings stayed, and the same sheds now hold a food hall, a brewery and twenty-three hanging whales.
- Kolaportið · The flea market runs in a customs warehouse at weekends, and in one corner it sells hákarl — shark buried in gravel for months until the ammonia in its flesh breaks down. Greenland shark is poisonous fresh; this is what a people without salt did about it.
- Settlement Exhibition · In 2001 builders digging a hotel foundation hit a wall of turf. It is a longhouse from around 930, and the hotel was abandoned so the hall could stay where it was found, under the street, with the pavement as its ceiling.
- Austurvöllur & Alþingi · In October 2008 all three Icelandic banks collapsed in a week, owing eleven times the country’s entire economy. Icelanders stood on this square banging pots until the government fell, then jailed twenty-six bankers — the only country that did.
The heat under your feet
Nine out of ten Icelandic homes are heated by water pumped straight out of the ground, and the country burns almost no oil to stay warm. Until the 1930s Reykjavík was a coal town, black with smoke; a single borehole changed that. This walk is the city’s hot water, and it ends in a swimming pool — which is where Icelanders actually meet each other. Two and a half hours. Bring a towel, and swimsuit.
- Laugardalur · The name means hot-spring valley, and until 1930 the women of Reykjavík walked three kilometres here with laundry on their backs, washed it in the steaming pools, and walked back. The path they wore is still marked.
- Laugardalslaug · The largest pool in Iceland, outdoors, fifty metres, open at half past six in the morning all year round at twenty-nine degrees. Six euros. In January people swim lengths in the dark with snow on the deck.
- Sundhöllin · Reykjavík’s first indoor pool, 1937, designed by the same architect as the great church on the hill. It was built because the city decided every child must learn to swim — in a country where drowning was the commonest way a man died.
- Öskjuhlíð · A bare gravel hill that the British army fortified in 1940 and the city then planted with 180,000 trees, mostly by hand and mostly by volunteers. Iceland was deforested by the settlers within three centuries; this is one of the few woods in it.
- Perlan · Six tanks holding twenty-four million litres of hot water from the ground, with a glass dome built over them in 1991 because the mayor thought the city’s water supply should also be a view. The water arrives at eighty-five degrees.
- Nauthólsvík · A beach on the North Atlantic with yellow sand shipped in from Morocco, and a pipe that pours geothermal water into the lagoon so it holds eighteen degrees. The sea beside it is five. People go into both, in that order.
What Iceland writes
One Icelander in ten publishes a book. Almost every book in the country appears in the same six weeks before Christmas, the catalogue is posted free to every household, and on Christmas Eve people give each other books and spend the night reading them — the jólabókaflóð, the Christmas book flood. This walk goes uphill through the city that does that. Two hours, and one real climb.
- National Museum · Iceland’s claim to be a nation rested on manuscripts: calfskin books written in the 1200s in which the sagas were set down. Denmark held them for centuries, and returned the first of them in 1971 — a warship brought it, and the country stopped to watch.
- Nordic House · Alvar Aalto built this low blue-roofed house in 1968 and designed everything in it down to the door handles. Inside is a library of every Nordic language, free to walk into, and the chairs are the ones he drew.
- Tjörnin · The pond freezes in winter except for one corner, where waste heat from a building keeps the water open and every bird in the city crowds into it. The city hall was deliberately built standing in the water on columns, and the country argued about it for years.
- Skólavörðustígur · The street was painted in rainbow stripes for Pride in 2015 and the city kept it, repainting it every year. Iceland was the first country in the world to elect an openly gay head of government, in 2009, and nobody campaigned on it.
- Hallgrímskirkja · Named for a seventeenth-century poet whose fifty hymns on the Passion were in every Icelandic house, read aloud each Lent, for three hundred years. The church took forty-one years to build and its front is shaped like the basalt columns in the lava fields.
- Einar Jónsson Museum · Iceland’s first sculptor gave the state his entire output on condition it build him a house to hold it, and this windowless concrete block went up in 1923 on what was then bare hill. The sculpture garden behind it is free and always open.
Getting to Reykjavik and getting around
- Keflavík Airport · 45 minutes out of town, and the bus is the only way in
- BSÍ Terminal · Every bus out of Reykjavík leaves from here
- Domestic Airport · Flights to the fjords, and it sits inside the city
- Hlemmur · The city bus hub, and a food hall above it
Cheap eats in Reykjavik
Eight counters where Reykjavík eats standing. Iceland is expensive and nobody argues about it — these are the places where lunch is twelve euros instead of forty: a hot-dog stand that has fed the town since 1937, two fish factories turned food halls, and a bakery that sells out by eleven.
- Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur · About €5, open until one in the morning
- Hlemmur Mathöll · Lunch €12-16, and open from eight
- Grandi Mathöll · Eight kitchens in a fish factory, and the cranes outside
- Sandholt · A fourth-generation bakery, and the sourdough goes by eleven
- Brauð & Co · A painted shed below the church, and the cinnamon roll
- Kaffivagninn · Fish of the day about €20, and the view is the harbour
- Café Loki · Opposite the church, and the place to try the shark
- Kolaportið · Weekends only, and the cheapest dried fish in town
Museums in Reykjavik
- National Museum · €15, closed Mondays in winter
- Settlement Exhibition · €12, a real longhouse, and it is under the street
- Hafnarhús · €19 covers three art museums for 24 hours
- Kjarvalsstaðir · In the park, and the same €19 ticket
- Maritime Museum · €13, and the coastguard ship outside is included
- Whales of Iceland · €32, twenty-three full-size whales, and good for rain
- Árbæjarsafn · €13, twenty houses moved here, and a turf church
- Einar Jónsson Museum · €10, and the sculpture garden behind is free
Nature and day trips near Reykjavik
Reykjavík is a city you can leave in twenty minutes, and the things worth leaving for are not far. Everything here is free, and the weather decides, not the plan.
- Þingvellir · 45 minutes out, free, but €8 for the car park
- Gullfoss · Free, and the spray soaks you from the lower path
- Geysir · Free. The great one sleeps; Strokkur erupts every 8 minutes
- Mount Esja · Free, bus 57 to the foot, and two hours up to Þverfellshorn
- Grótta · Free, and check the tide before you cross
- Viðey · €19 return ferry, and Yoko Ono’s light tower on it
- Elliðaárdalur · A salmon river inside the city, and a path along it
- Botanical Garden · Free, and it proves what will grow this far north
Things to do in Reykjavik with kids
- Family Park & Zoo · €13, and the park next to it is free
- Laugardalslaug · €6, three water slides, and hot tubs at 42 degrees
- Perlan · €47, a real ice cave indoors, and a planetarium
- Whales of Iceland · Children walk under a blue whale, and may touch it
- Nauthólsvík · An 18-degree lagoon, free in summer, and real sand
- Hljómskálagarðurinn · The pond park, and bread for the ducks is banned — bring oats
Live music in Reykjavik
A town of 140,000 people exported Björk, Sigur Rós, Of Monsters and Men and Laufey. The reason given locally is that the winters are long, the music school is free, and everybody is in two bands.
- Harpa · Free to enter, and concerts from €25
- Gaukurinn · The oldest rock bar in town, and the stage is tiny
- Kex · A biscuit factory, and jazz most nights, free
- Prikið · A 1951 café by day, and hip-hop until five
- Íslenski Barinn · Live Icelandic music nightly, and no cover charge
- National Theatre · Opened in 1950, and most plays are new Icelandic work
Nightlife in Reykjavik
Beer was illegal in Iceland until the first of March 1989, and the date is still marked. The night starts late — nobody goes out before midnight, because the drink at home is a third of the price — and it ends at five.
- Kaffibarinn · Free entry, and packed from one in the morning
- Kaldi Bar · The first Icelandic microbrewery, and happy hour until seven
- Laugavegur · The whole night happens on 600 metres of one street
- Sky Lagoon · €60, open until ten, and the sunset is the reason
- Sundhöllin · Open until ten, and the roof tubs under the stars
- Grótta · Where the night ends in winter, looking up
Frequently asked questions about Reykjavik
What is there to see in Reykjavik?
The top sights in Reykjavik are Hallgrímskirkja, Harpa and National Museum. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Reykjavik?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Reykjavik without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Reykjavik?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Reykjavik, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Built out of fish.
How do you get to Reykjavik and get around?
The main ways are Keflavík Airport, BSÍ Terminal and Domestic Airport. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Reykjavik, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Reykjavik that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Reykjavik for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.