I was really looking forward to my day exploring the Snæfellsnes peninsula with my Icelandic friend. In Western Iceland there were 3 peninsulas, the West Fjords in the North West, the Reykjanes peninsula close to Reykjavik in the South West. Snæfellsnes was the peninsula in between.
There are a few things that Snæsfellsnes is known for and the most famous is Kirkjufell Mountain, one of the most photographed sights in the whole of Iceland. Snæfellsjökull National Park forms the tip of the peninsula, the preservation of the glacier the primary reason for National Park status.
However, one of the most interesting things to me was the initial drive onto the peninsula. This is basically a desert. A huge expanse of mostly flat land, covered in snow at this time of year, with craters of extinct volcanoes dotted around it. On a clear day such as this, the craters were easy to see on this desert plain. I hadn’t seen this side to Iceland so far, I was impressed. But I’ve always loved this type of Arctic terrain, so it wasn’t surprising I was enjoying this scenery.
We stopped to see Bjarnafoss, translated as Waterfall of the Dead. I think the intention when we stopped was that I would just take a photo from the car park, but eager to get a better view I galloped off down the footpath to get a good angle for photographs. I didn’t walk to the bridge because I could see it was still icy, but I still got a good view from the observation point.
As we drove on, my friend told me about Iceland’s first and only serial killer, Axlar-Björn. If you need an illustration of how little crime there is in Iceland, you may be interested to know that Axlar-Björn was born in the 16th century and Iceland hasn’t had a serial killer since! Axlar-Björn owned a farm and offered the medieval equivalent of a farmstay to travellers. Unfortunately, many of the travellers never left the property, he murdered them with an axe and stole their clothes, money and horses. He confessed to killing 9 people, although he is believed to have killed double that number. He was caught when he tried to kill one of his siblings. The sibling managed to escape and reported Axlar-Björn to the authorities. The first murder victim had been buried in the cowshed manure pit, the rest had been thrown into a leech filled pond. He was sentenced to death and executed near Hellnar in 1596.
My friend also recounted a tragic tale about a couple who died in a car crash just before they got married. I asked him if he knew any happy stories before I was completely depressed. But actually there was no way I was going to be depressed on a day like this, driving the perimeter of the peninsula, enjoying the spectacular scenery of Snæfellsnes.
We continued out onto the peninsula, away from the volcanic craters and towards the coast. Our first stop was in Arnarstapi where there were dramatic views of the cliffs and the coastline below. We went to look at the Atlantic coast where you get a stunning view of the Hellnar Arch, an arch shaped sea stack being battered by the powerful waves of the Atlantic Ocean.
We came back past giant half-man half-troll, Bárður Snæfellsás, who has been immortalised in a lava rock sculpture. He gave his name to the peninsula, Snæ means snow in Icelandic.
Briefly the saga of Bárður is that he sailed from Norway with his family in the 9th century and landed at Djúpalón Beach. In Arnarstapi, Bárður’s eldest daughter, Helga is pushed onto an ice floe by her cousins when they are playing by the sea and disappears into the fog. Helga lands in Greenland, but her father thinks she is dead and kills the cousins who pushed her onto the ice floe by hurling one into a ravine and the other off a cliff. Bárður announces he has killed the two young men, but his brother is out at sea and does not learn the news until he returns. The two brothers begin wrestling and destroy much of the surrounding landscape as they have the strength of giants. Bárður wins the fight, but regrets killing his nephews and wounding his brother so he goes to live on the glacier as a protective spirit for the people living on the peninsula. I sat on his knee for a photograph and then we moved on. It was too cold to hang around for long today.
We pushed on to the village of Hellnar and here we could get a good view of Snæfellsjökull Glacier. My friend drove down to the harbour, and because he was relatively local, as in Icelandic, he could get away with it and from here you could see the glacier and the coastline and the village church. It made for a beautiful photograph. We walked along the coast path for a short time to look at more sea stacks.
The tip of Snæfellsnes Peninsula is designated as Snæfellsjökull National Park. Hiking trails run all through the park, both coastal paths and trails to get closer to the glacier. On a reasonably warm summer day, it would have been pleasant to do a longer hike, in freezing temperatures with icy blasts of wind, a long coastal walk would have been pretty miserable. I would have to come back one summer to do some longer hikes.
However, my friend did want to take me to the nearby beach and I had no problem with a short walk to Djúpalónssandur, a beach where the remains of a shipwrecked fishing trawler from Grimsby can be found. There used to be a fishing village here, but these days this area is uninhabited.
We hiked down to the beach and indeed there were lots of rusty pieces of iron scattered all over the beach. The Epine GY7 was wrecked on the beach in March 1948 during bad weather and only 5 of the 19 crew survived the shipwreck. This was a tragic reminder of how perilous it is to work as a fisherman. Even today it is a dangerous job where you’re working in cold conditions on rough sea.
There was a whale out at sea, you could see the faint water spouts as it breathed, but it was too far away to be able to see clearly.
From the beach if you turned away from the Atlantic, there was a perfect view of Snæfellsjökull, the glacier the National Park was created to protect.
We headed back up the beach and on to our next stop, a volcanic crater.
The volcanoes on Snæfellsnes are extinct. But there are lots of craters and you can drive right into some of them, like the Hólahólar volcanic crater which is ruled by invisible elves.
I had to get out of the car and have a photo taken in this crater, but even though I was inside the crater and not on an exposed upper ridge, it was very windy in here. It was almost like I was inside a wind tunnel and I was struggling to stand upright for the photos. Was it the invisible elves making mischief because we’d disturbed them by driving into the crater?
My Icelandic friend is one of the huge number of Icelanders who believe in elves, so if they do exist, they should have seen him as a friend. As a Yorkshire lass who has been on many ghost tours and never seen, heard or felt a thing, I am a little more sceptical about the existence of these hidden people, so I was more inclined to think it was just the wind. Even so, going inside the volcanic crater was one of the highlights of my day, so maybe it was the influence of the elves that made me love this spot so much.
We ruled out the idea of climbing to the upper ridge of any of the volcanic craters on a day of practically gale force winds. Even when it’s relatively calm, the couple of times I’ve been to the top of a crater (in Death Valley and South Australia), it’s been very windy on the ridge, so on a day when I could barely stay upright inside the crater, I would have no chance of surviving a ridge hike.
We passed a few of these volcanic craters with paths to the ridge as we drove out of the National Park and headed towards the place everyone who goes to Snæfellsnes comes to see and one of the most photographed spots in Iceland, Kirkjufell.
First of all we made our way to Ólafsvík, passing waterfalls made of icicles that had formed at the side of the road due to the well below freezing temperatures of the past couple of weeks.
Ólafsvík has a church with unusual architecture, the first modern church in Iceland dating from 1967 with a separate bell tower. Ólafsvík is one of the larger towns on the peninsula and as well as a modern church it has a monument to the fishermen who lost their lives at sea. The Icelandic population live near the coast and fishing has always been an important part of the culture. It still is in Ólafsvík, the town has a harbour, although there wasn’t going to be much activity from there at the moment, since the boats were frozen in the harbour as the water had turned into solid ice.
After a short stop in Ólafsvík, we drove on to the most visited part of the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, Kirkjufell.
Kirkjufell translates as Church Mountain. The iconic photograph is of the mountain with the small Kirkjufellsfoss waterfall in the foreground. So I was surprised just how close the mountain was to the sea. First of all we went to the beach so I could see the mountain from this angle and it was a view I’d never seen in a photograph. There was a huge amount of ice on the stony beach, so I didn’t venture too far onto it. In fact, I wanted to capture the ice in my pictures, so I needed to find the best position to do this. I did really like this view. I also enjoyed it because it wasn’t crowded, although that might have also had something to do with the fact it was now getting quite late in the day.
After the stop on the beach we went to the car park to do the short walk to view the mountain from the side of the waterfall. The mountain had no snow or ice on it, even in these cold temperatures, the exposed rock was grey and the surrounding vegetation was brown at this time of year, but the waterfall was frozen solid and most of the river was covered with thick ice. I took some photos, but it was getting cold by now, the light was fading, so we made our way back to the car park.
We still had a 2 hour drive to get back to Reykjavík, but I had now seen most of the peninsula, so I was content to sit back and relax and enjoy the scenery as we headed back to the city.
I travelled to Iceland in March 2023.
I flew to Iceland with Easyjet who have daily flights from Manchester to Keflavik in the winter.
Luckily I have an Icelandic friend with a car, who generously took me on a day tour of the Snæfellsnes Peninsula. If you are not fortunate enough to have an Icelandic friend as a driver and guide, there are bus tours from Reykjavik that go to Snæfellsnes.
Read about my nights out to view the Aurora in my other post about Iceland.