Skogar Folk Museum

One of Iceland's best rural heritage museums, with restored turf houses and 18,000 artefacts

The Skogar Folk Museum is one of the finest rural heritage museums in Iceland, and deserves more time than most visitors give it. The outdoor section contains a collection of restored traditional turf houses — some fully furnished with original tools, furniture, and domestic objects — that give a concrete sense of the extraordinary difficulty of everyday life in Iceland before the 20th century. The grass-roofed houses are genuine historical structures, reassembled here from across the district.

The indoor exhibition building holds a vast collection of boats, fishing equipment, agricultural tools, household objects, and clothing, all assembled by a single collector over sixty years. The selection is remarkable in its completeness: this is not a curated highlights show but the actual accumulation of everything that one obsessive man could save from the farms of his district. Allow two hours minimum; the museum is far larger than it looks from outside.

things to do museum
A story
The museum was founded by Þórður Tómasson, who began collecting objects from the surrounding farms in 1949 when he was seventeen years old. He spent the next six decades assembling the collection almost entirely by himself, wandering the district and persuading farmers to donate or loan objects they no longer used. When he finally retired from running the museum in 2015, at age 83, he had accumulated over 18,000 artefacts.