Snæfellsnes and Jules Verne: Journey to the Centre of the Earth in Iceland

Jules Verne never set foot in Iceland, yet he chose one exact spot on it — the ice-capped crater of Snæfellsjökull — as the entrance to the centre of the earth. On the fourth day of Odyssey’s small group tour, travellers drive the coast road he never saw, past farms, black sand and basalt cliffs, to stand beneath the volcano he made famous without ever visiting. It is one of the tour’s most complete days: geology, literature and a fishing culture that has barely changed since Verne was writing, all inside a single loop of a peninsula small enough to circle before dinner.

A Peninsula Verne Never Visited, But Somehow Knew

Snæfellsjökull is a stratovolcano, a cone built in slow layers of lava and ash over tens of thousands of years, its upper slopes still sealed under a permanent ice cap even as the volcano beneath it is dormant rather than dead. Seen from Reykjavík on a clear day, it sits on the horizon nearly a hundred kilometres away, a pale triangle that has been guiding sailors and unsettling storytellers for as long as Iceland has had either. When Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Centre of the Earth in 1864, he sent his fictional professor to exactly this crater, reasoning — with the loose scientific licence of the era — that a volcano quiet enough to be climbed was the most plausible entrance to the world beneath it.

Verne worked from maps and travellers’ accounts, not memory, and it shows in small ways once you’re standing on the mountain’s flank: the novel’s landscape is more dramatic than the real one, its access more perilous. What the book got right was the mountain’s character. Snæfellsjökull looks like a place with something underneath it — a sense the tour’s local guides lean into rather than correct, because the geology underneath the legend is, if anything, more interesting than the fiction built on top of it.

From Reykholt to Snæfellsnes: A Day’s Drive Between Two Icelands

This full day forms part of Odyssey’s 17-day circumnavigation of Iceland, and its position in the route matters. The previous day’s stop was at Reykholt, where the saga writer Snorri Sturluson lived and worked — a place that turned medieval Icelandic history into literature nearly seven hundred years before Verne turned Icelandic geology into fiction. Driving from one to the other in a single overnight is a useful reminder that Iceland has been supplying writers with raw material for a very long time, and that the country’s relationship with story is older and stranger than any one author’s contribution to it.

The volcano itself belongs to the same restless system that shapes so much of the country: magma chambers, hot rock and groundwater that surface elsewhere as the geysers, hot springs and geothermal heating networks running under Icelandic towns. It is the same volcanic and geothermal inheritance that heats homes and greenhouses hundreds of kilometres away, which is part of why a supposedly dormant mountain can still feel like it is holding its breath.

How much walking does the Snæfellsnes day involve?

Roughly two to three hours of walking spread across several short stops, not one continuous hike. The ground at Djúpalónssandur and around the Lóndrangar cliffs is loose black sand and uneven basalt, consistent with the tour’s Level 2 — Moderate rating of up to eight kilometres of walking on uneven terrain across a full day. Sturdy, closed footwear earns its keep here more than on the tour’s city days, and the pace is set by the group rather than rushed between stops.

Bjarnarhofn and the Shark: An Uncomfortable Icelandic Delicacy

The day’s first proper stop is Bjarnarhofn farm, where farmer Hildibrandur shows visitors his tiny wooden church and, with evident enjoyment, a taste of hákarl — fermented Greenland shark, cured for months until the ammonia smell arrives before the plate does. It is not a delicacy in the ordinary sense; it is closer to a rite of passage, and most travellers try a piece more for the story than the flavour. The farm sits on a working shark-curing operation that has supplied the surrounding region for generations, and Hildibrandur’s explanation of why the shark has to be buried and fermented before it’s safe to eat is, for most of the group, the most memorable ten minutes of the morning.

Fishing Villages on the Peninsula’s Rim

Beyond Bjarnarhofn, the coach follows the coastline through a string of small fishing settlements, each little more than a harbour, a scatter of houses and a church, strung along a shore that has supported the same trade — cod, then herring, now a mix of species managed under modern quota — since Iceland was first settled. These villages rarely make it into guidebooks on their own, but seen in sequence from the road they build a picture of how the country actually works away from Reykjavík: small, self-sufficient, and shaped entirely by what the sea will give up that season.

Do we actually go up onto the Snæfellsjökull glacier?

No — the peninsula day views Snæfellsjökull from the coast road and the farms and villages around its base, rather than climbing onto the ice itself. The tour’s one glacier walk happens later, on Vatnajökull in the south, where the group explores by special jeep with a local guide. At Snæfellsnes the volcano works as a backdrop and a literary landmark rather than a destination to be climbed, which suits a day that is really about the coastline underneath it.

Djúpalónssandur’s Black Sand and Its Lifting Stones

The bay at Djúpalónssandur is one of the peninsula’s genuinely strange places: a stretch of black volcanic sand scattered with rusted iron fragments from a British trawler wrecked here in 1948, and four stone boulders of different sizes once used to test the strength of young men hoping to be taken on as fishermen. Lifting the smallest stone marked a boy fit for the boats; the largest was reserved for the strongest hands in the crew. The stones are still there, worn smooth, and travellers are welcome to try — carefully, and mostly for the photograph rather than the outcome.

From the bay, the cliffs of Lóndrangar rise close by: two basalt sea stacks, the remnants of an eroded crater, standing apart from the cliff line like broken teeth. They are a protected nesting site for seabirds through the summer months, and the short walk out to the viewpoint is one of the day’s easier stretches — level ground, with the wind doing most of the work of making it memorable.

What’s the best time of year to see the peninsula’s colours?

Late May through September gives the clearest light and the best chance of seeing Snæfellsjökull’s ice cap free of the low cloud that can hide it for days even in summer. A September departure adds the outside chance of aurora sightings on the drive back toward Stykkishólmur once it’s dark. Earlier in the season the farmland around the peninsula is at its greenest against the ice above it, while the long daylight of high summer allows a slower pace at each stop without racing the sunset.

Lóndrangar’s Neighbour: The Village of Arnarstapi

The coast road curls on to Arnarstapi, a harbour village small enough to walk end to end in ten minutes, framed by columnar basalt cliffs and sea arches carved by centuries of Atlantic weather. Fishing boats still work out of the tiny harbour, and the clifftop path above it — flat, well marked, and popular with birdwatchers — gives one of the best views on the peninsula back toward Snæfellsjökull itself, the volcano now behind rather than ahead of the group. Local folklore places a half-man, half-troll figure named Bárður as the guardian spirit of this stretch of coast, a story every bit as strange, in its own way, as anything Verne invented for the mountain above it.

Evening in Stykkishólmur: Folk Music and a Fishing Town’s Harbour

The day ends in Stykkishólmur, a working harbour town on the peninsula’s north shore, where the group stays two nights before the onward ferry south. Coloured timber houses line streets that slope down to a working fishing fleet, and the evening includes a display of local folk music and dancing at the hotel — a livelier, more sociable close to the day than most of the tour’s dinners, and a good place to compare notes on the shark tasting from that morning.

Will solo travellers feel included on the evening in Stykkishólmur?

Yes — the folk music and dancing laid on at the hotel is a shared group event rather than a couples’ activity, and it’s one of the more sociable nights on the tour. Dinner tables are arranged for the group as a whole rather than split by room type, so solo travellers aren’t seated apart from everyone else. It’s a natural evening to swap impressions of the day with fellow travellers before the group moves on.

The Next Morning: Bird-Watching Cruise and the Road Toward the Westfjords

Stykkishólmur’s second morning brings a short bird-watching cruise among the Breiðafjörður islands before the group boards the afternoon ferry north, a crossing that opens onto Iceland’s Westfjords, a landscape of narrower fjords, higher bird cliffs and smaller, more isolated fishing communities than anything encountered so far. It is a deliberate contrast built into the itinerary: Snæfellsnes as an accessible, compact introduction to Iceland’s volcanic coastline, followed immediately by a region that asks a little more of the traveller and gives correspondingly more back.

Few single days on the tour cover as much ground, literally and otherwise, as this one: a farm and a fermented shark, a wrecked trawler and a set of lifting stones, basalt cliffs guarded by a troll, and a volcano that convinced a nineteenth-century novelist he had found the roof of the underworld. Snæfellsnes rewards travellers who arrive curious about both the geology and the stories people have told about it, and Odyssey’s small group format leaves enough room in the day to take both seriously.