Reykjavík: Downhill to the Sea

Construction began in nineteen forty-five. It took forty-one years. The main body was completed in nineteen seventy-four. The tower wasn't finished until nineteen eighty-six. Forty-one years of a country with three hundred thousand people pouring concrete one season at a time.

The church is named after Hallgrímur Pétursson, a seventeenth-century Icelandic poet and Lutheran pastor whose Passion Hymns — fifty religious poems about the suffering of Christ — have been part of the Lutheran service in Iceland for over three hundred years. Every Icelander still knows lines from them. He died of leprosy in sixteen seventy-four at the age of sixty.

Now, the tower. Take the lift to the top. It costs about a thousand króna, and from the observation deck you'll see the entire city of Reykjavík, the harbour, the distant mountains of Mount Esja across the bay, and on clear days the snow-capped Snæfellsjökull glacier a hundred and twenty kilometres to the north. It is the single best panoramic view in Reykjavík.

Before we walk down, look at the statue in front of the church. That's Leifur Eiríksson, Leif the Lucky, son of Erik the Red, the Icelander who reached North America around the year one thousand — almost five hundred years before Columbus. The statue was a gift from the United States government in nineteen thirty, given to Iceland to celebrate the one-thousandth anniversary of the Alþingi, the Icelandic parliament, which we'll visit in about an hour. The plaque reads: "Leifr Eiricsson, son of Iceland, discoverer of Vinland." Vinland was probably what is now Newfoundland, where in nineteen sixty Norwegian archaeologists excavated an actual Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows. It's the only confirmed pre-Columbian Norse site in North America, and it matches, almost exactly, the saga descriptions of Leif's landing. Leif came from an Icelandic farm. He went to America. He came home. He is why Iceland has always had slightly complicated feelings about Columbus Day.

When you're ready, walk straight down the hill from the church. You'll be on a wide pedestrian street lined with colourful painted houses, and if it's been freshly repainted, the pavement itself is also painted — in rainbow stripes. That's Skólavörðustígur, our next stop.

The painted rainbow that runs down the middle of the pavement is newer. It was first painted in twenty fifteen for the Reykjavík Pride parade. It was supposed to be temporary. The city fathers and mothers were planning to scrub it off after the festival. But the rainbow was so popular with both locals and tourists that the city decided to make it permanent, repainting it every spring. Skólavörðustígur is now, effectively, a permanent public monument to Reykjavík's queer community, which is — if you're curious — proportionally one of the largest and most politically active in Europe. Iceland elected the world's first openly gay head of state, Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, in two thousand and nine. She's from here.

Take your time walking down. On your right you'll pass the Reykjavík Grapevine, a free English-language newspaper that's the best way to find out what bands are playing that night. At the halfway point, on your left, is the Handknitting Association of Iceland, the most famous place in the country to buy a genuine lopapeysa, a traditional Icelandic sweater knitted from the waterproof wool of Icelandic sheep. Patterns are different in every village, and every sweater is handmade. A good one costs thirty thousand króna and will outlast you.

At the bottom of Skólavörðustígur, you'll hit Laugavegur, the main shopping and nightlife street. Turn right. Walk west for about four hundred metres. You'll see a small red wooden hot dog stand on your right, with a queue out front. That's our next stop.

The sausage itself is distinctly Icelandic. It's made primarily from Icelandic lamb — which is what the sheep eat in a country with almost no grain production, lots of grass, and a long history of sheep farming. The lamb gives the sausage a slightly stronger, gamier flavour than a typical American hot dog. There's also a mix of pork and beef, but the lamb is what makes it taste Icelandic.

In two thousand and four, Bill Clinton was in Reykjavík for a conference on childhood literacy. Someone, probably his security detail, suggested he should try the Icelandic street food while he was here. Clinton walked down from his hotel, stood in line like everyone else, and ordered a hot dog with mustard only — no onion, no remoulade, no ketchup. That variant is now on the menu as "the Clinton." The photograph of Clinton holding his Bæjarins Beztu hot dog was published worldwide, and the stand became a pilgrimage site.

Two years later, in two thousand and six, The Guardian newspaper ran a feature titled "The best hot dog stand in Europe," and awarded it to this one. Every American tourist in Reykjavík has been coming here ever since. James Hetfield of Metallica. Anthony Bourdain. The prime minister of Norway. At any given time, the queue has four generations of Icelanders and three generations of foreigners standing in it together.

Eat your pylsa. Stand against the wall of the old shipping warehouse. Enjoy the thing. When you're ready, walk west down Tryggvagata. After about two hundred metres, on your left, you'll see a large open plaza with a grand stone statue of a man in nineteenth-century clothes facing a long, low grey building with columns. That's Austurvöllur, the eastern field, and the man is Jón Sigurðsson, the father of Icelandic independence. And the low grey building behind him is where democracy has been happening in Iceland for almost eleven hundred years.

Now look at the long, low grey building behind him. That is Alþingishúsið, the Parliament House, built in eighteen eighty-one. And the word Alþingi is the key. The Icelandic parliament, the Alþingi, was founded in the year nine hundred and thirty AD by the Viking-era settlers of Iceland. That is almost eleven hundred years ago. It is not the oldest parliament in the world — the British claim that for the English House of Lords in some formulations — but it is the oldest continuously functioning parliament that we have written records of. For the first eight centuries of its existence, the Alþingi met outdoors, at Þingvellir, the place of the parliament — a dramatic natural rift valley about forty-five kilometres east of here. The chieftains of the thirty-six Icelandic family-districts gathered for two weeks every summer to hear the Law-Speaker recite the law from memory and to vote on new legislation.

In eighteen oh one the Danes dissolved the Alþingi. But they allowed its revival in eighteen forty-five — moved to Reykjavík, given this building in eighteen eighty-one, and re-established as the legislative body of independent Iceland in nineteen forty-four. Sixty-three members. A proportional parliamentary system. A parliament building small enough that, theoretically, any citizen could knock on the front door.

Now, look at the plaza. It's a small square. It's an intimate space. It's exactly the size of a crowd that a small democracy needs. And so this square has been the site of the single most powerful grassroots political events in modern Icelandic history.

In October two thousand and eight, Iceland's three largest banks collapsed within a single week. The country's entire financial sector imploded. The króna lost half its value. Unemployment tripled. Thousands of families lost their savings. The government — the conservative coalition in power at the time — seemed paralysed.

What happened next is called Búsáhaldabyltingin, the Pots and Pans Revolution. For months, starting in January two thousand and nine, thousands of ordinary Reykjavíkers gathered right here on Austurvöllur every evening, bringing pots, pans, wooden spoons, and kitchen utensils. They stood in front of the parliament building and banged their pots as loudly as they could. For hours. Every night. The noise was deafening and it was constant.

On the twenty-sixth of January two thousand and nine, after weeks of the pots-and-pans protests, the Icelandic government resigned. The prime minister, Geir Haarde, stepped down. Elections were held. A Social Democratic-led coalition took power. Iceland became the only country in the world after the two thousand and eight collapse to actually jail its senior bankers — nine of them eventually went to prison.

That happened here. Four thousand people with kitchen utensils brought down a government, on this small square, behind this statue of Jón, in front of that modest grey parliament building.

When you're ready, walk south out of Austurvöllur. After one short block you'll reach the edge of a small pond with swans and ducks on it. That's Tjörnin, and the grand building on its northern shore is our next stop.

Notice that part of the pond stays unfrozen even in the hardest winter. There's a warm-water pipe under the north end of the pond, piped in from the city's geothermal hot-water system, specifically to keep a section open for the birds. Every time Iceland's hot springs heat somebody's house in Reykjavík, the water continues downhill through the system and ends up here, keeping the ducks happy. The entire city, by the way, is heated by geothermal energy. About eighty-five per cent of all homes in Iceland are heated by hot water pumped directly from underground hot springs — no oil, no coal, no natural gas — and the water is so abundant and cheap that Reykjavík has enough to leave a geothermal swimming pool open in every neighbourhood all year round, even outdoors in a winter snowstorm.

Turn to face the grand modernist building on the northern edge of the pond. That's Ráðhúsið, the City Hall, built in nineteen ninety-two by the Icelandic architect studio Studio Granda. It's a striking piece of Nordic modernism — concrete, glass, and water. Inside, on the ground floor, is a forty-square-metre three-dimensional relief map of the entire country of Iceland. Every mountain, every glacier, every fjord, at a scale of roughly one to thirty-thousand. If you're planning to travel elsewhere in Iceland after this walk, go inside City Hall and study the map. It will save you from underestimating the distances.

Reykjavík's municipal council meets in the upper floor of the building. It has fifteen members, elected every four years. The current mayor is Einar Þorsteinsson. The atmosphere of Icelandic municipal politics is, essentially, Seinfeld with fewer laughs. The mayor does the grocery shopping like anybody else. The former mayor, Jón Gnarr, was a professional comedian who ran a satirical campaign in two thousand and ten called the Best Party, promising free towels at all swimming pools. He won. He was mayor for four years and, by most accounts, did a competent job.

When you're ready, walk east along the northern edge of the pond. You'll come back near Austurvöllur after two minutes. Then turn north on Aðalstræti. It's a short street, only about a hundred and fifty metres long, but it happens to be the oldest street in Reykjavík.

At number ten on your left, you'll see a small but handsome wooden building painted white with a dark roof. That's the oldest wooden house in Reykjavík, built around seventeen sixty-two, originally as a wool-factory workers' dormitory, and now an atmospheric restaurant called Fish Company.

A few steps further on, at number sixteen, is a more important building. Go inside. The ticket is about two thousand króna and it is the best two thousand króna you will spend in Iceland.

In two thousand and one, during construction of a hotel on this site, workmen digging the foundation struck something beneath the gravel — stone foundations and turf walls in a pattern that did not belong to the eighteenth-century wool factory. Archaeologists were called in. Excavation revealed a Viking-era longhouse, roughly twenty metres long and eight metres wide, with a central hearth, turf walls built up from the bedrock, and the post-holes for the wooden roof frame. Using volcanic tephra layers — the distinctive ash bands that every Icelandic volcanic eruption deposits in a known year — the archaeologists dated the longhouse to about eight hundred and seventy-one AD, give or take two years.

Think about that. A Viking longhouse, older than the official founding of the Alþingi in nine hundred and thirty, inhabited by people who may have been among the very first permanent settlers of Reykjavík. The excavation matches, almost precisely, the saga date for Ingólfur Arnarson's arrival in eight hundred and seventy-four.

The entire longhouse site was preserved in situ. The hotel was built over it, suspended on pillars. Then a museum — the Settlement Exhibition, called 871 plus or minus two — was opened inside the building, with the longhouse visible through glass floors and video walls that reconstruct how Reykjavík looked twelve hundred years ago when only a handful of families lived here. It is the single most emotional history museum I have ever visited. Ingólfur's generation. The first Icelanders. The foundation of everything else we've been walking through.

When you're done inside, leave the museum and walk north down Aðalstræti. At the end of the street, turn right on Hafnarstræti. Walk east for about five hundred metres. You'll see a building ahead of you that looks like it's made of ice. That's Harpa, our next stop, and it's the newest major monument in Reykjavík.

The exterior is made of over twelve thousand geometric glass panels of various colours — mostly pale gold and smoky grey, with some deeper tones — arranged in a honeycomb pattern that reflects the sea and sky. The design was developed by the Danish-Icelandic artist Ólafur Elíasson in collaboration with the architecture firm Henning Larsen Architects. The hexagonal tessellation is a deliberate echo of the basalt columns found throughout Iceland's volcanic geology — the same natural formation that inspired Hallgrímskirkja at the start of this walk. The whole building is a translation of volcanic rock into quasicrystalline glass, and on a sunny day the effect is genuinely otherworldly.

Go inside. The atrium is free to enter, and it's worth going upstairs to the fourth floor for the view back across the city toward the mountains. There's a café. There's a design shop.

Now, the story of how this building nearly did not get built.

In two thousand and seven, the Icelandic government and the Landsbanki, the country's largest bank, jointly commissioned a new concert hall to replace Reykjavík's inadequate existing concert venue. Construction started in May two thousand and seven. Fifteen months later, in October two thousand and eight, Iceland's banking system collapsed. Landsbanki went bankrupt. The Icelandic government went bankrupt. The national currency lost half its value against the euro.

Harpa was roughly fifty per cent built. The steel frame was up. Most of the interior work was unstarted. The project cost was enormous — eventually almost twenty-eight billion króna, about two hundred and sixty million US dollars at pre-crisis exchange rates — and Iceland suddenly could not afford to finish it. For three months in late two thousand and eight, the project was halted entirely. The half-finished building stood on the harbour as a visible symbol of the country's catastrophic overreach.

The debate in Iceland was brutal. Many Icelanders wanted to demolish the steel frame and turn the site into a parking lot. The building, they argued, was an embarrassing monument to the vanity of the collapsed banking class. But the government decided to complete it. Even in the middle of austerity, a cultural centre on the waterfront would be an investment in the country's future and a signal to the world that Iceland was not defeated.

Harpa opened on the fourth of May, twenty eleven, with a performance of Mahler's Symphony No. Nine by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. The building is now considered one of the most successful concert halls in Europe. The acoustic quality, designed by the firm of Japanese acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, is world-class. The chamber hall, Norðurljós, has been called one of the finest small concert spaces in the world. Harpa hosts the Iceland Airwaves festival every November and dozens of classical, jazz, and electronic music events year-round.

Check the schedule at the ground-floor ticket counter. If anything is on tonight, buy a ticket. There is nothing else like it in the North Atlantic.

When you're ready, walk out onto the waterfront path in front of Harpa and head east for about three hundred metres. You'll see a silver sculpture ahead of you, sitting on a stone plinth at the water's edge. That's Sólfar, and we need to have a careful conversation about what it is.

The Sun Voyager is NOT a Viking ship.

It looks like a Viking ship. It has a long curving prow and skeletal ribs and a sharp swept-back stern. Tourists have been calling it "the Viking ship statue" for decades. But the artist explicitly rejected that interpretation, multiple times, in multiple interviews, before he died.

Jón Gunnar Árnason described Sólfar as "a dream boat, an ode to the sun." He said — these are his actual words — "the sculpture is not a Viking ship, it is a dream of hope, promise, and freedom, sailing not to lands once found but to undiscovered territories." The skeletal ribs and the bare prow are meant to evoke a dream of travel to the sun — a vessel that might carry the human soul outward toward the light, not inward toward Viking history.

I tell you this because it matters. Árnason was an abstract modernist whose entire artistic career was about escaping the weight of the past — the Viking kitsch, the saga nostalgia, the heavy mythology that Iceland sometimes uses to sell itself to tourists. He wanted to make a sculpture that looked forward, not backward. He gave it a name — Sólfar, Sun Voyager — that has absolutely nothing to do with Vikings. He described it as a boat sailing toward the sun.

And yet, like most public art, it has outlived its author's interpretation. Tour guides default to Viking ship. Postcards default to Viking ship. Tourists pose in front of it and tell their family back home they've seen "the Viking ship statue." Árnason would be, and probably is wherever he is, somewhat exasperated.

Stand in front of it. Look along its length. The prow points north-northwest — that's toward the Arctic, not toward any historical Viking destination. The stern swings out toward the mountains of Mount Esja across the bay. When the low Arctic sun hits the polished steel in the early morning or late evening, the entire sculpture lights up like a beacon. That's the point. A boat sailing toward the sun.

Photograph it. Think about it. Remember: not a Viking ship. A dream boat.

When you're ready, walk south, away from the water, across the road called Sæbraut. You'll see a small grassy hill ahead of you, topped by a dark bronze statue of a tall man in a cloak holding a spear. That's our last stop, and it's the narrative bookend to the entire walk.

Here's the legend of Ingólfur, as it's told in the Landnámabók, the Book of Settlements, one of the earliest Icelandic sagas, written down in the twelfth century.

In around eight hundred and seventy-four AD, Ingólfur Arnarson and his sworn blood brother Hjörleifur Hróðmarsson, both Norwegian chieftains, sailed from Norway to Iceland to escape a blood feud. As their ship approached the south coast of Iceland, Ingólfur, following ancient Norse custom, threw his two high-seat pillars — the carved wooden pillars that marked the seat of the family patriarch — overboard. He vowed to settle wherever the gods washed them ashore.

It took Ingólfur's slaves three years to find the pillars. They were eventually discovered on the beach of a small bay on the southwest coast. Ingólfur travelled overland with his family, his livestock, and his wife Hallveig, and arrived at that bay in about eight hundred and seventy-seven AD. He built his longhouse on the bay. He named the place Reykjavík — the Smoky Bay — because of the steam rising from the hot springs he could see on the shore. He thought the steam was smoke. He was wrong. But the name stuck.

Ingólfur and Hallveig farmed here, raised their children, and died here. We don't know the exact date of Ingólfur's death, but it was before nine hundred AD. His grandchildren were among the chieftains who founded the Alþingi in nine hundred and thirty AD.

This is the hill he's said to have first climbed when he arrived. On top of it, at the beginning of everything, he stood and looked out over the bay, the smoke rising from the hot springs, the hills around him, and the empty land that he would turn into a farm, then a village, and — eventually, long after his death — a country.

And the twelve-hundred-year-old longhouse we saw excavated under the Settlement Exhibition on Aðalstræti — that house was probably occupied by Ingólfur's direct descendants, two or three generations after the original settlement.

So stand here. Look out across Reykjavík. You've walked from the highest point of the modern city, down the rainbow street, down the main shopping drag, past the hot dog stand that feeds the Americans, across the parliament square where democracy continues, around the geothermal pond with the ducks, through the oldest street and the first longhouse, out to the glass concert hall built after the banking collapse, past the dream boat of the sun, and finished at the bronze of the first man who ever stood on this hill and saw the steam of the hot springs and thought: here.

Þakka þér fyrir. Thank you. Welcome to Reykjavík.

The Old Harbour was built between nineteen thirteen and nineteen seventeen as Reykjavík's main commercial port, replacing the previous open-beach landing that had served the town since Ingólfur's time. For most of the twentieth century it was one of the busiest fishing harbours in the North Atlantic. Cod, haddock, herring, and halibut were landed here by the tens of thousands of tonnes every year, processed in the warehouses along the waterfront, and shipped south to the fish markets of Britain and Europe. The entire Icelandic economy, until tourism and aluminium smelting overtook it in the nineteen nineties, depended on what came through this harbour.

Today the main commercial fishing port has moved further west, to Grandi. But Gamla Höfnin is still an active dock. Fishing boats are still tied up along the quay. You can watch them unload their catch in the early morning. The fish restaurants along the harbour — Sægreifinn, the Sea Baron, is the most famous — serve grilled fish skewers that the chef, Kjartan Halldórsson, a former fisherman, invented in the nineteen nineties using the day's catch from boats tied up twenty metres away. The lobster soup there, humarsúpa, is one of the finest seafood dishes in northern Europe. It costs less than you think.

The harbour is also Reykjavík's departure point for the wildlife that makes Iceland famous beyond the city. Whale-watching boats — Elding, Special Tours, Whale Safari — all depart from here. The season runs from April to October. Minke whales, humpback whales, harbour porpoises, and, if you're lucky, orcas and blue whales. Puffin-watching tours, in summer only, go to the small rocky island of Akurey offshore. The puffins nest there in their tens of thousands between May and August.

If this is your first day in Reykjavík, book a whale tour for tomorrow morning. If this is your last day, eat at Sægreifinn right now.

And this, finally, is the actual end of the walk. Behind you, the Old Harbour. To your south, the cathedral-spire of Hallgrímskirkja on its hill, where we started. Between them, the city of Reykjavík — a capital of four hundred thousand, the smallest in Europe, built on basalt and heated by steam, walked end to end in less than two hours.

You are welcome back any time.