Akureyri, Iceland: The Capital of the North

After a long day of seal coasts, horse country and a high mountain pass, the road drops into Eyjafjörður and there, at the head of Iceland’s longest fjord, is a proper town: houses climbing a green hillside, a twin-towered church above the centre, a harbour deep enough for ocean ships. Akureyri, Iceland, is the largest town in the north and its cultural and commercial centre, which is why Icelanders call it the capital of the north. This guide explains how a Danish trading post grew into that role, what is worth seeing in and around the town, including its botanical garden and the waterfall of Goðafoss, and the practical side of a visit: hills, steps and northern weather. On Day 8 of our Iceland cultural and wilderness small group tour, the group crosses the Öxnadalsheiði pass into Akureyri for a short guided visit.

A town at the head of Iceland’s longest fjord

Akureyri’s setting explains most of its history. Eyjafjörður runs for more than 60 kilometres from the open sea to the town, a long, narrow trench carved by glaciers over many thousands of years and later flooded as sea levels rose. Steep mountains, streaked with snow well into summer, wall it in on both sides, and the town sits where the fjord ends and the valley begins. NASA’s Earth Observatory, describing the fjord from space, notes Akureyri’s ice-free port and a climate that is surprisingly mild for a place so close to the Arctic Circle.

Those mountains shelter the town from the worst of the wind, and the north generally receives far less rain than the south coast. Summers can be warm and bright by Icelandic standards, while winters are colder and snowier than in Reykjavík. On 1 January 2025, Statistics Iceland counted 20,159 people in Akureyri and its immediate surroundings, which makes it the largest urban area in Iceland outside the south-west. By road it lies about 390 kilometres from Reykjavík on Route 1, the Ring Road.

From Danish trading post to the capital of the north

The fjord was settled in the ninth century, but for most of Iceland’s history there was no town here at all. Akureyri first appears in the records in 1562, and at that time its only buildings were the shops and storehouses of Danish merchants. In the seventeenth century the merchants set up trading camps here for the season and sailed home for the winter. The name is usually read as a field (akur) on a spit of land (eyri), and the spits matter: the old town grew on one, and another, Oddeyri, was built up by the Glerá river and later filled with warehouses and homes.

Permanent life began slowly. Visit Akureyri dates the first residential house to 1778, and in 1786 Akureyri became one of Iceland’s certified trading towns, with just 12 inhabitants. It lost that status in 1836 and regained it in 1862, after which the town grew steadily on fishing, trade and industry. Today it is the north’s main centre for services, education and culture, with a university, an airport and a busy cruise season.

The oldest part of town is Innbærinn, the inner town, a strip of timber houses along Aðalstræti beneath the hillside. Information boards with QR codes tell the story of individual houses and districts. Aðalstræti 14, the old hospital, was built in 1835 and is the second oldest building still standing in Akureyri. Walking here, with the painted wooden houses, corrugated-iron roofs and small gardens, gives a clearer sense of the nineteenth-century trading town than anything in the modern centre.

What to see in Akureyri, Iceland

The town’s landmark is Akureyrarkirkja, the Lutheran church on the hill above the centre. It was designed by Guðjón Samúelsson, the State Architect who also designed Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík, and consecrated in 1940. Its two slender towers and stepped, vertical lines are often said to echo the basalt columns that inspired much of his work. Inside, the central panel of the altar window is traditionally said to have come from the old Coventry Cathedral in England, destroyed in the Blitz; later research, publicised by a BBC documentary, has cast serious doubt on that story, so it is best taken as a cherished local tradition. At the time of writing the church opens on summer weekday afternoons and closes for funerals and other services, so check before you climb up.

Akureyri also punches above its weight culturally. The Akureyri Art Museum, which opened its galleries in 1993, was the first institution outside Reykjavík to concentrate solely on the visual arts. Hof, the cultural and conference centre that opened in August 2010, is home to music and the performing arts, and the North Iceland Symphony Orchestra was founded in the town in 1993.

Two writers’ houses repay a visit. Nonnahús, built in 1850 and one of the oldest buildings in town, was the childhood home of Jón Sveinsson, a writer and Jesuit priest who wrote as Nonni; his stories of an Icelandic boyhood were translated into many languages, and the museum keeps editions in tongues as unexpected as Chinese and Esperanto. The house of the poet Davíð Stefánsson was bequeathed to the town by his relatives and is now a memorial museum. The Akureyri Museum, the local history museum, runs several of the town’s smaller museums.

The Akureyri botanical garden

Lystigarðurinn, the Akureyri Botanical Garden, is one of the most surprising sights in the north. It opened as a public park in 1912, became a botanic garden in 1957 and has been enlarged three times, and it now covers about 3.6 hectares on the hillside some 40 to 50 metres above sea level. Its collection is remarkable for a garden so near the Arctic Circle: about 6,600 non-native plant taxa, alongside some 430 native species. Tall perennials, alpine plants, birch, rowan and spruce grow in sheltered beds, and in midsummer the borders look more like an English garden than anything you expect in Iceland.

The garden sits on Eyrarlandsvegur, about 1.5 kilometres from the town centre and uphill from it. At the time of writing it is open all year as a public park, with its facilities open from 1 June to 30 September and the café open year-round; check the garden’s website before you go. The tour’s short guided visit to Akureyri does not set out a fixed list of stops, so treat the garden as a place worth knowing about rather than a promised visit.

Goðafoss, the Waterfall of the Gods

About 35 kilometres east of Akureyri, close to the Ring Road, the river Skjálfandafljót drops over Goðafoss. It is not tall, about 12 metres, though the Environment Agency of Iceland gives a range of roughly 9 to 17 metres depending on the flow, but it is around 30 metres wide, a broad horseshoe split by rock into two main falls and a few smaller ones. The water is a clear blue-green, and the falls are visited all year.

The name means Waterfall of the Gods. Around the year 1000, the Althing asked Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði, the lawspeaker and himself a pagan chieftain, to decide between the old gods and Christianity, and he chose Christianity as the law of the land. According to tradition, he threw his statues of the Norse gods into these falls. Our article on the Althing and Iceland’s medieval parliament tells the wider story of that assembly. Goðafoss was protected as a natural monument on 11 June 2020.

There are car parks on both banks, with marked paths to the viewpoints; the west side has the shortest walk. Paths along the rim are uneven and can be slippery with spray or ice, so stay behind any ropes. On the tour, the group visits Goðafoss on Day 9, on the way east to Lake Mývatn and its pseudo-craters, lava formations and birdlife.

Around Eyjafjörður: islands and the Arctic Circle

Akureyri’s municipality reaches well beyond the town. Hrísey, a low island in the outer fjord, became part of Akureyri in 2004. A small ferry crosses to it in about 15 minutes from Árskógssandur, around 35 kilometres north of town; the island is 7.5 kilometres long, has no foxes or mink, and is known for its ptarmigan and nesting birds. Further out, the island of Grímsey, also part of the municipality, lies across the Arctic Circle. Neither is on the tour, but both help explain why Akureyri feels like the hub of a whole region rather than a single town. The whale-watching harbour of Húsavík on Skjálfandi Bay, which the tour visits on Day 10, lies a little further east.

Is Akureyri worth visiting?

Yes: Akureyri is the one place in the north where you find a real town’s worth of museums, galleries, churches and gardens, and it is the natural base for Goðafoss, Lake Mývatn and Húsavík. It also offers a contrast that makes a circuit of Iceland more interesting, a pause for civic life between days of lava, waterfalls and open coast. Travellers who enjoy history will find the old trading town of Innbærinn as rewarding as the scenery.

How much time do you need in Akureyri?

Half a day is enough to see the centre, the church and the old town at an easy pace, and a full day allows time for the botanical garden and one or two museums. Goðafoss needs about an hour on site plus the drive. On our tour the guided visit to Akureyri is short, coming at the end of a long travelling day, so it is an introduction to the town rather than a full exploration.

How much walking is involved in Akureyri?

The centre itself is compact and fairly level near the waterfront, but the town climbs steeply behind it. A long flight of steps leads from the centre up to Akureyrarkirkja, and the botanical garden lies uphill on the same slope, so expect some climbing if you want to see both on foot. Pavements are generally good, though they can be icy outside summer. The Iceland tour is rated Level 2, Moderate: participants need to be able to climb and descend stairs and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground.

When is the best time to visit Akureyri?

Summer is the easiest time to visit Akureyri, with long days, the botanical garden in flower and mountain roads usually open. In June the nights barely darken this far north, while in midwinter daylight lasts only a few hours and snow and ice are routine. The Öxnadalsheiði pass, the main road from the west, can close in bad weather, and conditions anywhere in Iceland change quickly. At the time of writing, the advice is to check road conditions on umferdin.is, alerts on safetravel.is and the forecast on vedur.is, the Icelandic Met Office, before you go, and to pack a warm, windproof layer even in summer.

Akureyri on Day 8 of the tour

Day 8 is one of the fullest travelling days of the journey. From Hrútafjörður the group drives to the Vatnsnes Peninsula, home to one of the largest seal colonies in Iceland, with a first stop at Illugastaðir, where seals can be spotted from the coast, and then on to Hvítserkur, a sea-eroded cliff rising 15 metres from the ocean. Our article on the seals of Vatnsnes and the rock of Hvítserkur covers that coast in detail. The road then leads into Skagafjörður, a region renowned for horse breeding, and to the farmhouse museum at Glaumbaer.

Glaumbaer is a group of 13 connected turf buildings, each with its own function; the oldest parts are believed to date from the mid-eighteenth century and the newest from the late 1870s, and the farm has belonged to the National Museum of Iceland’s historic buildings collection since 1947. From Skagafjörður the group crosses the Öxnadalsheiði mountain pass into Akureyri for the short guided visit, and the day ends with a lecture on the geology of Iceland, useful preparation for the volcanic country ahead. Our 17-day Iceland Ring Road itinerary for mature travellers shows how this day links the Westfjords to the north and east.

Akureyri rewards a little context. Look at the painted houses of the old town and remember that, little more than two centuries ago, a dozen people lived here around a merchant’s store; look up at the church and the garden on the hill and you see how far the town has come. On the Iceland cultural and wilderness tour, a small group of up to 16 travellers reaches the capital of the north with an Odyssey Program Leader, at the point where the journey turns from the western fjords towards the volcanic north.