Iceland’s Westfjords: A Route Through Fjords, Cliffs and Fishing Communities

Most of Iceland’s Ring Road runs through a landscape still being made: young lava fields, steaming vents, glaciers grinding fresh gravel into outwash plains. The Westfjords are older. This is Iceland’s oldest exposed rock, cut by ice into a hand of narrow peninsulas reaching into the North Atlantic, and the roads that thread through it were, for most of the twentieth century, some of the last in the country to be sealed. Travelling this stretch on Odyssey’s Iceland cultural and wilderness small group tour means leaving the geothermal country of the south behind for three days of ferries, fjord roads and fishing towns that have shaped, and been shaped by, this remoteness. It is one of the quieter legs of the Iceland Ring Road Itinerary, and one of the most distinctive.

A Peninsula Older Than the Rest of Iceland

Geologically, the Westfjords stand apart from the volcanic zone that produced most of the country’s famous landscapes. The bedrock here is basalt laid down by eruptions many millions of years before the rift valley that built the rest of Iceland became active, which is why this corner of the island has no active volcanoes, no geothermal fields and none of the young lava the Ring Road crosses further south and east. What it has instead is the record of repeated glaciation: successive ice ages carved the old plateau into the deep, steep-sided fjords and narrow peninsulas that give the region its name and its shape on the map. Every road here climbs a heath between fjords and drops back down to sea level, a pattern that governs the pace of travel as much as the scenery.

The isolation this geography created is not incidental to the region’s story — it is the story. Westfjords communities grew up facing the sea rather than each other, connected by boat long before they were connected by road, and many of the mountain passes now crossed by coach were impassable in winter within living memory. Understanding that isolation is the key to understanding everything else on this leg of the route: why fishing became the economic backbone of nearly every settlement, why populations here are so small, and why places like Ísafjörður developed a strong, self-contained civic identity rather than growing outward into a larger regional centre.

That isolation has also shaped the region’s modern history in ways still visible from the road. Population decline has been steady and, in some valleys, severe: farms and even entire fishing stations have been abandoned over the past century as younger generations moved to Reykjavík or overseas, leaving weathered foundations and the occasional roofless church as the only markers of settlements that once supported dozens of families. Where the population has held, or grown, it is usually because a fjord happened to have a natural harbour deep and sheltered enough to support a modern fishing fleet — a piece of geographic luck that separated the Westfjords’ surviving towns from the ones that quietly emptied out around them. Reading the landscape this way, as a record of which fjords could support a harbour and which could not, adds a layer of meaning to what might otherwise look like empty, scenic country.

Crossing Breiðafjörður: From Snæfellsnes to the Westfjords

The Westfjords are reached, on this tour, by water rather than by road. After exploring the glacier and lava coast of the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, the group travels to the small port of Stykkishólmur for a short bird-watching cruise among the islands of Breiðafjörður, one of the largest and shallowest bays in Iceland. The bay is scattered with an estimated several thousand skerries and islets, many of them historically used for egg-collecting and eider-down harvesting, and it remains an important nesting ground for seabirds. From Stykkishólmur, the afternoon ferry carries the group across the bay to Brjánslækur on the southern shore of the Westfjords — a crossing of a little over two hours that trades the road entirely for open water and is, for most travellers, the first sense that this region operates on its own terms.

The overnight stop at the tiny settlement of Flókalundur sets the tone for what follows: small, spread-out communities, long views, and distances that take longer to cover than the map suggests.

How much walking does the Westfjords route involve?

Most days in the Westfjords are spent travelling by coach between sites, with walking limited to short stretches at each stop rather than sustained hiking. The exception is the clifftop path at Látrabjarg, which is uneven and unfenced in places; the group walks only as far along it as is comfortable, and the terrain is broadly consistent with the tour’s stated Level 2 — Moderate activity level, which anticipates up to three to five hours of activity a day, some of it on uneven ground.

Látrabjarg: Europe’s Great Seabird Cliff

From Flókalundur, the route runs to Látrabjarg, the westernmost point in Europe and one of the continent’s largest seabird colonies. The cliffs run for several kilometres along the coast, dropping steeply to the Atlantic, and are home in season to enormous numbers of nesting seabirds — razorbills, guillemots and puffins among them — drawn by ledges that offer both height and inaccessibility to predators. Standing at the cliff edge, with Europe running out beneath your feet and nothing between you and Greenland but open ocean, is one of the more disorienting geographic experiences on the whole circumnavigation.

The cliffs and their birdlife are covered in far more depth in Odyssey’s dedicated guide, Látrabjarg Puffins: Bird Cliffs and Seabird Life on Iceland’s West Coast, which goes into the seasonal patterns and conservation context this route article only has space to summarise.

When is the best time of year to see the seabirds at Látrabjarg?

Seabird activity at Látrabjarg peaks through the northern summer, roughly from late spring into August, when nesting colonies are at their busiest. Numbers thin noticeably by early autumn as birds disperse back out to sea, so a departure earlier in the season generally offers a livelier cliff than one later in the year.

The Dynjandi Waterfall and the Road to Ísafjörður

From Látrabjarg the route climbs over the Dynjandisheiði mountain pass into Arnarfjörður, pausing at Dynjandi — the largest waterfall in the Westfjords. Rather than a single drop, Dynjandi falls in a series of wide, fan-shaped tiers down a dark basalt hillside, each stage broader than the one above it, so the whole formation reads almost like a staircase built for giants. It is among the most photographed sites in the region, and one of the few places on this leg where the group leaves the coach for an extended walk to take it in properly.

The road continues to the small fishing village of Flateyri, on the fjord of Önundarfjörður. Flateyri’s modern history is marked by a devastating avalanche in 1995, which struck the village with almost no warning and led to the construction of the protective barriers now visible on the slope above the town — a reminder of how directly the terrain that makes the Westfjords beautiful also makes it demanding to live in. From Flateyri, the route passes through the Westfjords Tunnel before arriving in Ísafjörður, the region’s largest town.

The tunnel itself is worth a moment’s thought as the coach passes through it. Before it opened in the early 1990s, the fjords around Ísafjörður were connected by road only via a high, frequently closed mountain pass, which meant that for much of the year the town and its neighbouring villages were effectively cut off from each other by land. The tunnel’s three-way junction, buried inside the mountain, replaced that seasonal isolation with a year-round link — a small piece of infrastructure that did as much to shape the modern Westfjords as any natural feature on the route.

Ísafjörður, Capital of the Westfjords

With a population of around 4,000, Ísafjörður is by far the largest settlement in the Westfjords, and functions as the region’s administrative, commercial and cultural centre. Built on a narrow sandy spit reaching into the fjord for which it is named, the town has a compact, walkable old quarter of timber-clad buildings that survived the twentieth century’s push toward concrete, giving it a historic character unusual for a working Icelandic fishing town.

Fishing is the reason Ísafjörður exists at all, and the reason it grew larger than any of its neighbours — a history the tour explores in detail at the town’s cultural museum, housed in a cluster of restored eighteenth-century timber buildings on the old harbourfront that are themselves among the oldest surviving structures in Iceland. Beyond the museum, the town has built a reputation well out of proportion to its size for its music scene and its annual winter festival, both of which draw on the same close-knit, self-reliant character that isolation produced elsewhere in the region.

Odyssey’s companion article, Ísafjörður’s Fishing Heritage: How the Westfjords Shaped Icelandic Life, follows that thread in full, from trade routes and boat design to the social life the fishing economy built around it; this route article touches on the town only as one stop among several, and readers wanting the deeper history are better served there.

Is the Breiðafjörður ferry crossing included, or do I need to book it separately?

The ferry crossing is arranged and included as part of the tour, along with every other transfer on this leg of the route. Travellers do not need to book, time or manage any of the Westfjords’ ferry, road or tunnel connections themselves — the Program Leader and local guides handle the logistics of this region’s more complicated travel days.

Ísafjarðardjúp: The Deep Fjord Beyond

Leaving Ísafjörður, the route follows the shore of Ísafjarðardjúp, the deep fjord system that gives the town its name and dominates the northern Westfjords. Ísafjarðardjúp is itself intersected by a series of smaller side-fjords, each with its own scattered farms and fishing settlements, so the drive is less a single coastal road than a repeated pattern of rounding one inlet after another. The route climbs over the Steingrímsfjarðarheiði mountain pass — weather permitting, with wide views back over the fjord system — before descending past the fishing village of Hólmavík and leaving the Westfjords proper on the way to the group’s next overnight stop.

It is a long travelling day by the standards of the rest of the circumnavigation, but it is also the day on which the region’s essential character is clearest: fjord, headland, fjord, headland, each one a small world of its own, connected only recently and still, in places, only barely.

Do solo travellers need to worry about accommodation in these remote fjord towns?

No — accommodation throughout the Westfjords is pre-arranged as part of the tour, with a single supplement available for solo travellers at every overnight stop, including the smaller villages such as Flókalundur where options are limited outside an organised group. Solo travellers are a normal and welcomed part of the group, and the small hotels used on this leg are booked well in advance specifically to accommodate the tour.

By the time the route leaves the Westfjords behind, the contrast with the rest of the Iceland Ring Road Itinerary is hard to miss — a slower, older, more weathered Iceland, held together by boats and mountain passes rather than the geothermal energy and young lava fields that define so much of the rest of the island. It rewards travellers willing to spend three days on ferries and fjord roads with a side of Iceland that fewer visitors ever see, and one that explains a great deal about how the country’s more remote communities have always lived. Odyssey’s small group format, with its Program Leader managing the ferries, tunnels and mountain passes, is built for exactly this kind of demanding, rewarding terrain.