Hellnar

Hellnar is a tiny, ancient fishing village at the western end of the Arnarstapi coastal walk, with a harbour sheltered by a natural basalt breakwater and a small cafe that serves the best soup in Iceland on cold afternoons. The village is old by Icelandic standards — fishing was practised here for centuries before the peninsula's population shifted inland — and the arrangement of old turf-walled fishing huts alongside the modern cafe has a genuine lived-in quality.

The cliff area around Hellnar harbour contains a sea cave called Baðstofa where seabirds nest in huge numbers; the cave can be peered into from the path. The landscape between Hellnar and the base of the glacier is a lava field with a character quite different from the cliff walk — dark, chunky aa lava from eruptions a few thousand years ago, with mosses beginning to colonise the cracks and hollows. The Snæfellsjökull National Park visitor centre is nearby, with information on the park's geology, ecology, and hiking routes.

things to do nature sight
A story
Hellnar's most famous resident was the poet and Nobel Prize laureate Halldór Laxness, who used a farmhouse near the village as a summer retreat later in life. He is buried nearby. Laxness won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955 and is Iceland's only Nobel laureate; his novel Independent People, set in the rural west Iceland highlands not far from here, remains the essential Icelandic novel.