Höfn

Where it sits. Höfn — properly Höfn í Hornafirði, and the name simply means harbour — stands on a low spit at the mouth of the Hornafjörður lagoon in southeast Iceland, about 460 kilometres from Reykjavík by the south coast and 240 from Egilsstaðir. It is the seat of Sveitarfélagið Hornafjörður municipality, with a town population of roughly 1,700 and around 2,300 in the wider district, which makes it the largest settlement between Vík and the eastern fjords. The town is built on flat ground barely above sea level, with streets running out toward the harbour on three sides, and its situation is the whole point: the Vatnajökull ice cap and its outlet glaciers fill the northern horizon, while the sand spits and tidal channels of the lagoon fill the southern one.

A harbour that had to be earned. Hornafjörður's entrance, the Hornafjarðarós, is a narrow channel between shifting sandbars, and it has always been one of the more difficult approaches on the Icelandic coast — deep enough for trawlers but demanding, with the channel dredged and marked and local pilots knowing where the sand has moved. Trading began here at the very end of the nineteenth century, with regular commerce from 1897, and the settlement grew through the twentieth around fish processing rather than around agriculture. Until the Ring Road was completed across the Skeiðarársandur in 1974, Höfn was effectively cut off from the west by unbridged glacial rivers, and its links ran by sea and by air. That isolation ended within living memory, and it explains the town's slightly self-contained character.

Langoustine, and an honest note about it. Höfn built a national reputation on humar, the Norway lobster or langoustine, and has run a summer festival around it since the early 1990s; restaurants along Víkurbraut and at the harbour still base their menus on it. The fishery, however, collapsed. Iceland's Marine and Freshwater Research Institute recorded a sustained failure of recruitment through the 2010s and advised a complete halt, and the langoustine fishery was closed from 2021. Local kitchens now work with imported or frozen stock, or have shifted to other seafood, and the festival has broadened accordingly. It is a small, specific illustration of something visible all along this coast: an economy tied directly to what the sea and the ice are doing.

The glaciers on the doorstep. Three outlet glaciers of Vatnajökull come within easy reach — Hoffellsjökull to the northeast, reached by a gravel road to a proglacial lagoon with floating ice; Fláajökull and Heinabergsjökull to the north, both with marked approach tracks and both retreating visibly year on year. On a clear day Hvannadalshnúkur, Iceland's highest point at 2,110 metres on the Öræfajökull volcano, is visible far to the west. Jökulsárlón, the glacier lagoon that has become the most visited site in the region, lies about 80 kilometres west along Route 1, and Höfn is the closest town to it with a full range of services.

What to do in the town itself. Gamlabúð, a timber warehouse built in 1864 and moved to the harbour front in 2014, now houses the Vatnajökull National Park visitor centre with exhibitions on the ice cap and the region's geology. The Ósland peninsula at the southern end of town has a short walking loop past a monument to lost seamen, with arctic terns nesting in numbers through early summer and views back across the lagoon to the ice. The harbour itself is working rather than ornamental, with a fish market, boat repair and a swimming pool nearby that follows the Icelandic pattern of hot pots open late. Hoffell, twenty minutes inland, has small geothermal tubs looking toward the glacier.

On screen and in the region's imagination. The glacier country within reach of Höfn has a long film history — Svínafellsjökull, about a hundred kilometres west near Skaftafell, has doubled for Himalayan and extraterrestrial ice in major productions — and the black-sand headland at Stokksnes, fifteen minutes east, carries a purpose-built Norse film set behind its dunes. The set is a set: it was built in 2010 for a feature that was never made. Real Norse heritage in Iceland is documentary and archaeological rather than architectural, and the popular television series that made Viking imagery ubiquitous were filmed in Ireland. Höfn's own claim on the past is more prosaic and more truthful — a fishing settlement that grew where a difficult harbour happened to be usable.

Getting there. Route 1 runs through the edge of town, and the airport, Hornafjarðarflugvöllur, sits five minutes away with scheduled flights to Reykjavík. Buses along the south coast call here in summer. The town works well as a two-night base for Stokksnes, the glacier lagoons and the eastern approach to Vatnajökull National Park.