A Midwinter Journey Far North: Unraveling Iceland’s Hidden Charms
Anyone who has moved north to make Iceland home knows its pull is difficult to explain away. Reykjavik holds the title of The World’s Most Northerly Capital City, and it stands to reason that Iceland’s northernmost settlement, Raufarhöfn, carries a similar kind of cold magnetism.
Sitting at 66.454°N, Raufarhöfn is a coastal village in northeast Iceland, and it earns that description in full. On a dark midwinter morning, my wife and I left our home in Akureyri, pointed our rented Dacia Duster northeast, and went looking for whatever the place had to offer.
Dog Paws and Atlantic Shores
The drive covers 200 kilometers of Iceland’s northern interior. Any hope of scenery was buried almost immediately under a proper snowstorm. The heavy snowfall — hundslappadrífa in Icelandic, a word that conjures snowflakes as wide as a dog’s paw — closed in around the road until we were squinting at the verge, hands tight on the wheel.
Winter is my favourite season here. That said, it demands a certain honesty about your limits. If you’re planning a drive like this one, make sure you actually know how to handle snow-covered roads. Finding the edge of one by accident is not how you want to learn.
“Eventually, the cold compelled us to leave the enchantment of the stones and retreat back to our car.”
Our accommodation was the Grásteinn Guesthouse, just outside Þórshöfn, and our hosts couldn’t have been more generous. The welcome committee, however, was a pair of sheepdogs — Kappi and Bessi — who came flying through the headlights in a blur of black and white fur. I grabbed my camera, certain I’d spotted Arctic foxes. I had not. The dogs were very pleased with themselves, and they supervised every step of the bag-carrying with considerable interest.
When daylight arrived and the snow had eased, the setting finally made sense. The north-facing porch looked out over a valley gone completely white, the horizon edged in the pale pink of a winter sunrise. The only sound was the Atlantic surf, steady and distant. Everything else was quiet.
Spiritual Stones
The Duster’s dashboard read -6°C as we rolled into Raufarhöfn that morning — not cool so much as simply cold. Driving through town, we kept glancing up at the nearby Malrakkaás hill, where the arches of Heimskautsgerðið, or The Arctic Henge, broke the skyline. Hard to miss, hard not to stare at.
Heimskautsgerðið draws comparisons to England’s Stonehenge, and the scale justifies them. Some arches reach ten meters in height, cut from locally sourced stones weighing up to three tonnes. It works simultaneously as a tourist attraction, a spiritual site, and a solar calendar rooted in Icelandic literary culture.
The four outer arches are named Norðri, Suðri, Austri, and Vestri — the cardinal directions and, in Icelandic mythology, the four dwarves said to hold up the sky. The landscape around Raufarhöfn is flat enough that no mountain or building interrupts the sun’s path, which means the alignment works exactly as intended.
“The current lack of visitor infrastructure is refreshing, evoking a sense of untouched natural beauty rather than that of a conventional tourist hotspot.”
In town, the snowplough was working through the previous day’s accumulation, though the road to the Heimskautsgerðið car park was still untouched. The Duster managed it well enough, and we arrived to find the place entirely to ourselves.
That lasted about ten minutes. Two other cars pulled into the lot, circled once, and left. It was strange to watch — a new form of tourism where proximity apparently counts as a visit. We ignored it, pulled on every layer we’d brought, and walked up to the stones.
In solitude, Heimskautsgerðið is something else. The low winter sun caught the stones at sharp angles, lighting some faces brilliantly while the others fell into shadow. Fresh snow had settled into every crevice and silenced the whole hillside. My fingers complained every time I pulled a glove off to adjust the camera, and after a while the cold made the decision for us — time to go back to the car.
The project is managed by a local non-profit and was started about two decades ago by a local hotelier. It is still being built, which gives it something in common with Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona — a genuinely moving place that is also, always, unfinished and in need of support.
On the practical side: there are no facilities at the site. Stop in town for coffee and a bathroom before you head up the hill. Parking is free and the site is accessible at any hour, which only adds to the appeal. See it now, while it still feels like a discovery.
You Can’t Miss the Hi-Viz Lighthouse
Looking southeast from Heimskautsgerðið, a narrow spit of land pushes out into the Atlantic with an orange lighthouse sitting at its tip — as Icelandic a sight as you’ll find. We drove over for a closer look, and the area around Raufarhafnarviti, built in 1931, turned out to have some of the best views of Raufarhöfn and the surrounding coastline.
On a nearby hill, the bretastangir — British rods — stand as quiet reminders of the wartime occupation: radio communication towers put up by Allied forces during World War II. Coming back down, we passed Raufarhafnarkirkja, the town’s Lutheran church, built in 1928 to a design by Guðjón Samúelsson — the architect responsible for several of Iceland’s most recognisable churches, among them the one in Akureyri and the famous Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík.
Raufarhöfn was a serious fishing town through much of the 20th century. During the herring boom, several thousand people lived here. Today the population sits at around 200, and the amenities have contracted accordingly. But that’s not a reason to skip it. The fishing history, the wartime traces, and the ongoing ambition of Heimskautsgerðið give the place genuine substance — and the landscape it sits in does the rest.
John Pearson is a journalist and photographer. You can follow his work at johnpearson.co.
