Kirkjubæjarklaustur

Where it sits. Kirkjubæjarklaustur — Klaustur to everyone who lives there — is a village of roughly five hundred people on Route 1 in Skaftárhreppur, about 190 kilometres east of Reykjavík and 70 kilometres east of Vík í Mýrdal. It occupies a narrow shelf of green ground between the braided grey channels of the Skaftá river and a wall of cliffs and plateaux rising immediately to the north, with waterfalls dropping off the rim behind the houses. South of the village the land flattens into Meðalland, an immense plain of black sand, shallow tidal lagoons and shifting river mouths that runs out to the Atlantic. For anyone crossing the south coast this is the last full service stop before Skaftafell, which is why a village this size has a fuel station, a bank, a supermarket, a post office and several hotels.

The story behind it. Irish monks are believed to have lived here before Norse settlement, and the name records what came next: a Benedictine convent, Kirkjubæjar Abbey, founded in 1186 and dissolved at the Reformation in 1550. The landscape still carries the nuns' names — the waterfall Systrafoss, the lake Systravatn on the heath above it, and Systrastapi, the pillar of rock where two of the sisters were said to be buried after being burned at the stake. The village's defining moment came much later. During the Laki fissure eruption of 1783–84, the greatest lava-producing event in recorded Icelandic history, the priest Jón Steingrímsson held what is remembered as the fire sermon while lava advanced on the settlement; the flow halted at the edge of the parish, and the church built in 1974 stands in his memory.

Kirkjugólf. A few minutes east of the village, on flat grazing land, lies the Kirkjugólf or church floor: about eighty square metres of hexagonal basalt column tops worn smooth and level by ice and water, so regular that early inhabitants took it for the paved floor of a vanished church. It is the eroded top of a lava flow rather than anything built, protected as a national monument, and reached by a short marked path from a small car park. It rewards a slow look in wet weather, when rain fills the joints between the columns and the geometry stands out sharply.

On screen. Klaustur was the operational base for the Icelandic leg of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar in 2013, to the point where the production filled every hotel room in the village. Two separate alien worlds were shot from here. The ice planet work went east to the glacier tongues of Öræfi. The water planet — Miller's planet, the flat ocean world where a single mistake costs the crew decades — was filmed on the shallow tidal flats of Máfabót, out on the sand coast south of the village, where a hard sand bed under waist-deep water gave the crew a horizon-to-horizon sheet of water they could actually walk in. The towering waves were built digitally onto that plate. It was not a comfortable shoot: Anne Hathaway came close to hypothermia when her dry suit was not properly sealed. The lagoon itself sits on working farmland among roadless sands and is not a visitor site; the coast it belongs to, however, is visible from the Ring Road for the whole run west of the village.

What you actually see today. The village core takes twenty minutes to walk. Systrafoss drops directly behind it in two ribbons, with a steep zig-zag path climbing beside the falls through one of the few groves of trees in the district to Systravatn on the plateau, where the view runs south across the sands to the sea. Fifteen kilometres west, the canyon of Fjaðrárgljúfur cuts a hundred metres deep through palagonite in a series of serpentine bends; its path is periodically closed to let vegetation recover, so check before driving out. Northward, mountain track F206 leads to the Laki crater row and F208 towards Eldgjá — both are summer-only, four-wheel-drive routes with unbridged fords, and both are best done with a guided vehicle unless you have driven Icelandic highland roads before.

Getting there and timing. Route 1 runs through the village, so access is straightforward year-round, with scheduled buses along the south coast in summer and a reduced service in winter. July and August give open highland tracks and the fullest choice of tours; late September brings autumn colour on the heath and far fewer vehicles. Winter is quiet and often beautiful, but the surrounding roads are exposed and the highland routes are firmly shut. Fuel here before continuing east: the next stations are sparse, and the stretch across Skeiðarársandur has no services at all.