Ísafjörður’s Fishing Heritage: How the Westfjords Shaped Icelandic Life

The road north from Látrabjarg climbs, drops and climbs again through a landscape of fjords carved by ice, before it finally reaches Ísafjörður — a town of some 4,000 people, built on a narrow spit of flat land between the mountains and the sea. It is the largest settlement in Iceland’s Westfjords, and for well over a century it was built almost entirely on fish. On Odyssey Traveller’s Iceland cultural and wilderness small group tour, Ísafjörður is where the isolated, wind-scoured western arm of the country gives way to a proper town — one with a cultural museum, a preserved timber old town, and a harbour that still tells the story of how fishing shaped Icelandic life more than farming ever did.

Why a Town Grew Here

Flat land is rare in the Westfjords. Steep, flat-topped mountains drop almost straight into the fjords, and Ísafjörður exists because of a small, hook-shaped sandbar — called Eyri — that offered both dry ground and a natural, sheltered harbour on Skutulsfjörður. Icelandic and foreign fishermen were working these waters from at least the medieval period, drawn by the rich cod grounds of Ísafjarðardjúp, the wide fjord the town sits inside. By the 16th century, English, and later German and Danish, merchants were trading here for dried fish, and a permanent trading post had taken hold on the sandbar. Everything that followed — the harbour, the warehouses, the town itself — grew outward from that single geographic accident.

How do you get to Ísafjörður, and why is it so remote?

On this tour, you arrive by road: a full day’s drive from Látrabjarg, over the Dynjandisheiði mountain pass with its stop at Dynjandi waterfall, through the fishing village of Flateyri, and finally through the Vestfjarðagöng — the tunnel that links Ísafjörður to the rest of the Westfjords’ road network. Until relatively recently, many of the region’s villages were reachable only by sea or on foot over the mountains; the tunnel is a modern convenience layered onto a genuinely old pattern of isolation. That isolation is exactly why the Westfjords still feel like a different, more maritime Iceland to the rest of the country — and why so few travellers make it this far west.

A Harbour Built on Fish

By the 18th and 19th centuries, Ísafjörður had become the commercial capital of the Westfjords, and its harbour front, Neðstikaupstaður, still carries the evidence. A cluster of timber trading houses built between the 1730s and 1780s — among the oldest wooden buildings anywhere in Iceland — once stored salt, timber and dried fish for merchants trading with Copenhagen and beyond. Fishing was never a side activity here; it was the entire economic reason the town existed, employing most of the population directly on boats or indirectly in salting, drying and packing houses along the shore.

The early 20th century brought the herring boom, when vast shoals of herring off the north and west coasts turned towns across Iceland into overnight boom settlements. Ísafjörður shared in that wealth, its harbour crowded with boats and its population swelling with seasonal workers. When the herring stocks collapsed in the late 1960s — overfished by an industry with no quota system to restrain it — the shock rippled through every fishing town in the country, and Ísafjörður was no exception.

From Herring to Quotas: A Changing Industry

What followed reshaped Icelandic fishing more broadly. Iceland introduced an individual transferable quota system in the 1980s, replacing open competition for a shrinking resource with tradeable rights to a set catch. It stabilised fish stocks, but it also concentrated ownership: quotas drifted toward larger operators and larger towns, and many smaller Westfjords settlements lost boats, and with them, young people, to Reykjavík or abroad. Ísafjörður weathered this better than most of its neighbours, partly because it kept a diversified fleet and partly because its harbour remained the natural hub for processing catch from the smaller villages around Ísafjarðardjúp. Trawlers, quota offices and fish-processing plants still operate from the harbour today, alongside a growing tourism trade that has, in its own way, become the town’s newest export.

How much walking is involved in visiting Ísafjörður’s old town and museum?

Not much. The old town sits on flat, reclaimed harbour land, so the walk between the cultural museum, the timber warehouses of Neðstikaupstaður and the harbour front is short and level underfoot. Odyssey classifies the wider Iceland itinerary as Level 2 – Moderate, with up to eight kilometres of walking on uneven ground on its most demanding field days, but Ísafjörður itself is one of the gentler stops on the circuit — a town visit rather than a hike.

Walking Ísafjörður’s Old Town

The tour’s morning in Ísafjörður centres on the cultural museum, housed in one of the old trading buildings, where local exhibits trace the town’s history from its earliest fishing settlement through the herring era to the present day. It is as much a museum of ordinary working life as of grand history: fishing gear, household objects and photographs of a harbour that once ran three shifts a day.

Stepping back outside onto Neðstikaupstaður’s narrow lanes, the scale of the old trading houses — modest by the standards of Reykjavík’s architecture — is a useful corrective to any assumption that Iceland’s wealth arrived only recently. This was a working port with real commercial weight for two and a half centuries before oil, aluminium or tourism entered the economy.

The Wider Westfjords Fishing Culture

Ísafjörður’s story is really the concentrated version of a pattern repeated all along the Westfjords route: small communities squeezed onto whatever flat land the fjords allow, almost every one of them built by and for fishing. The preserved trading houses here are simply the best-surviving example of an economy that shaped the whole region, from the smaller villages the tour’s Westfjords leg passes through to the harbours further afield. That same reliance on the sea runs through Icelandic diet more broadly — dried, salted and pickled fish remain everyday staples rather than novelties, a thread the tour picks up again when it looks at Icelandic food traditions later in the circuit.

When is the best time to visit Ísafjörður to see its fishing heritage?

Odyssey runs this tour in April and September, both shoulder-season windows when the Westfjords’ mountain roads are reliably open. September carries a reasonable chance of the Northern Lights on the drive north; April brings longer daylight and the first stirrings of the season’s fishing activity in the harbour. Outside these windows, several of the passes into Ísafjörður can close with snow, which is one reason the town’s isolation has shaped its history so strongly — for much of the year, it has simply been cut off.

Beyond Ísafjörður: Látrabjarg and the Road Through the Westfjords

Ísafjörður sits at the midpoint of the tour’s Westfjords leg, arrived at after a day spent at the bird cliffs of Látrabjarg, Europe’s largest seabird colony, and left behind the following morning via the long drive down Ísafjarðardjúp. It is a useful hinge point in the tour’s 17-day route around Iceland: the wildest, most maritime stretch of the whole circuit, and the clearest illustration of how completely geography — fjords, mountains and fish — has dictated where Icelanders could live.

Is Ísafjörður manageable for solo travellers on a small group tour?

Yes — solo travellers are a normal part of Odyssey’s small group, not an afterthought, and Ísafjörður’s compact old town is an easy, sociable place to explore together before the group continues north. A single supplement applies for solo travellers who prefer their own room, and having a Program Leader and local guides along means nobody is navigating this remote corner of Iceland alone.

Few places in Iceland make the connection between geography and livelihood as plainly as Ísafjörður. A sandbar offered flat ground and shelter; the fjord offered fish; and for two and a half centuries, everything else — the harbour, the warehouses, the town’s entire reason for being — followed from that. Visiting on Odyssey’s small group tour means seeing that history at close range, in a town still built around the same harbour that founded it.