The Settlement Exhibition Recaps the History of Reykjavík
If there’s one thing I never hesitate to tell visitors to Reykjavík, it’s that they really should spend an afternoon at the Settlement Exhibition. Over the years I’ve dragged family and friends through it, and taken my children — born and raised here — more times than I can count. So I was genuinely surprised to discover, not long ago, that I had missed an entire new section completed during the COVID years. A visiting friend from abroad gave me the push I needed to go back, and I’m glad she did.
Rewind
Anyone walking along Aðalstræti will clock the sleek glass structure with “871±2” emblazoned on it. What’s less obvious is that the foot traffic outside rarely makes it through the door. That’s a shame, because the Settlement Exhibition deserves far better.
Look down through the cubist glass skylight and you’ll see the remains of a Viking longhouse — the centrepiece of the original exhibition. The name says it all: 871±2 refers to the date of the structure, give or take a couple of decades. It’s about as direct a line to early Reykjavík as you’re going to find.
The longhouse came to light in 2001, when construction crews broke ground for a new hotel complex at the corner of Aðalstræti and Suðurgata. What they found stopped the project in its tracks: the oldest human-made structures ever discovered in Iceland. The underground space was redesigned around the site, and today you can walk among the remains of a longhouse thought to have been inhabited between 930 and 1000 AD, with turf walls dating back to around 871.
Embracing the Old
The original exhibition wraps around the longhouse, which has been raised on a platform so visitors can look closely at the hearth, the sleeping areas, and the sections believed to have housed animals. The east-facing wall even has a small porch — a detail that suggests the people who lived here were someone of standing in that early Reykjavík community.
It’s not just stones on the ground, though. The exhibition layers in interactive, high-tech elements that give a sense of what daily life looked like — without letting anyone touch a thing. Relics from other sites around Reykjavík and Viðey island line the perimeter, and the low lighting combined with ambient sounds of birds and sea wind makes the whole space feel oddly calm.
Discovering the New
On my most recent visit, I turned a corner and found a door where an interactive video used to be. My first thought was that it was some elaborate route to a gift shop. I was wrong.
That door opens into the newer part of the exhibition, spread across the adjacent basement and up into the black timber house at Aðalstræti 10. It functions as a proper passage through time.
Where the original room plants you firmly in the era of settlement, the expansion carries the story forward — from around 871 through the farms and markets that eventually took root in this same neighbourhood, all the way to the present day.
Old photographs of the city centre cover the walls, and it’s a peculiar feeling to stand there tracing what’s changed and what hasn’t. My kids loved hunting for our century-old house in a vintage photograph of Þingholt, and peering through a viewfinder at a miniature diorama of the city centre. My husband and I were just as absorbed, if we’re honest.
Part of Aðalstræti 10 is fitted out to evoke the general store that once operated there, as well as the office of a former priest. It has some of the open-air museum quality of Árbæjarsafn, without having to leave the city centre.
There is a gift shop — and yes, we did have to double back through the whole exhibition to retrieve our jackets from the foyer of the original section. We didn’t mind. A second pass turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.
Reykjavík has plenty of galleries and exhibition spaces. But there’s something different about an afternoon somewhere that connects you to the ground beneath your feet, whether you live here or you’re just passing through. The Settlement Exhibition does that quietly and well.
