Vatnsnes Seals and Hvitserkur: Wildlife on Iceland’s Northern Coast

North of Hrútafjörður, the Vatnsnes Peninsula reaches into the sea like an afterthought — a low, treeless finger of basalt and grazing land that most drivers on Iceland’s Ring Road never see, because the Ring Road itself skirts well to the south. It rewards the detour. Grey and harbour seals haul out along its shingle beaches in numbers found almost nowhere else in the country, and near the peninsula’s northern tip a 15-metre sea stack called Hvítserkur stands alone in the surf, pierced by two arches the Atlantic has worn through solid rock over thousands of years. Odyssey Traveller’s Iceland cultural and wilderness small group tour spends its eighth morning here, on the drive between the fjords of the Westfjords and the horse country of Skagafjörður, and it is one of the quieter, more contemplative stops on a circumnavigation otherwise dominated by glaciers, geysers and waterfalls.

A Peninsula Shaped by Seals

Vatnsnes juts out between Hrútafjörður and Húnaflói on Iceland’s north-west coast, a peninsula of low hills and coastal farmland with almost none of the drama travellers associate with the rest of the country. That is precisely why it works as a wildlife stop. The coastline is home to one of the largest seal colonies in Iceland, and the animals haul out on rocks and sandbars close enough to shore that no boat is required to see them. Two days earlier, the tour had stood on the clifftops of Látrabjarg, watching seabirds nest in their tens of thousands on a sheer wall of rock. Vatnsnes offers a different register of wildlife encounter: instead of birds wheeling far below on a cliff face, the seals here are at eye level, resting on skerries a short walk from the road, indifferent to the small groups of travellers who come to look at them.

The tour’s first stop on the peninsula is Illugastaðir, a former eider farm on the west coast where the coastline curves into a series of low rocky points. Grey seals and harbour seals both use these waters, and while the two species are easy to tell apart once you know what to look for — grey seals have a longer, horse-like snout, while harbour seals have a shorter, more dog-like face with nostrils forming a distinct V — from a distance most visitors are simply happy to watch a colony of seals go about an ordinary day: hauling out to rest, sliding back into the water, occasionally raising a head to watch the watchers.

How much walking does the stop at Illugastaðir involve?

Very little, and it’s one of the gentler outings on the itinerary. Odyssey rates the Iceland tour Level 2 – Moderate overall, meaning travellers should be able to manage three to five hours of activity a day, up to the equivalent of eight kilometres on uneven ground, across the tour as a whole. The seal-watching stop at Illugastaðir doesn’t approach that: it’s a short walk from the coach on a coastal path with no stairs and no technical terrain, and there’s no need to go further than the first viewing points to see seals well. Binoculars help, but a camera with reasonable zoom will do the job for photographs.

Hvítserkur, the Stone Troll

From Illugastaðir the tour continues a short distance north to Hvítserkur, a black basalt sea stack rising some 15 metres out of the water just off the peninsula’s eastern shore. It is one of Iceland’s most photographed natural landmarks, and its silhouette invites comparison — visitors have variously described it as a rhinoceros drinking, an elephant, or a dragon dipping its head into the sea. The rock is pierced by two arches worn through by millennia of wave action, and in summer it doubles as a nesting site for fulmars and other seabirds, whose droppings give the upper rock its pale, streaked appearance.

Icelandic folklore, inevitably, has an explanation. The story goes that Hvítserkur was once a troll determined to tear down the bells of Þingeyraklaustur monastery on the mainland, whose ringing offended him. Trolls in Icelandic tradition cannot survive daylight, and this one was so intent on his mission that he failed to notice the sun rising over the horizon until it was too late. The first light turned him to stone where he stood, and he has remained in the surf ever since — a piece of storytelling that sits alongside the geological explanation rather than competing with it, in the way so much of Iceland’s landscape carries both a scientific and a folkloric account of how it came to look the way it does.

By the time the tour reaches Vatnsnes it has already spent two days working through the fjords and mountain passes of the Westfjords, and the peninsula marks a change of pace. The landscape flattens out, the deep fjords give way to open coast, and for a morning the itinerary slows down to a single, unhurried wildlife stop before the road turns inland again.

Do we need to climb down to see Hvítserkur up close?

No. Hvítserkur is viewed from a clifftop lookout above the black-sand beach it stands on, which gives a clear, elevated view of the rock and its arches without requiring anyone to descend to the shoreline. A set of stairs down to the beach exists for travellers who want a closer look and are comfortable with the terrain, but it’s entirely optional — the view from the top is the one most people remember, and it’s the view the tour is built around.

From Seal Colony to Horse Country: Skagafjörður

Leaving Vatnsnes, the tour continues east into Skagafjörður, a broad agricultural region long associated with Icelandic horse breeding — the same sturdy, five-gaited breed that appears throughout the rest of the itinerary. The route calls at Glaumbær, a turf-roofed farmhouse museum that preserves the kind of dwelling ordinary Icelandic farming families lived in well into the twentieth century: thick walls of turf and stone built up over timber frames, designed to hold heat through winters far harsher than the coastal climate around Vatnsnes. Seen on the same day as the seal colony and the sea stack, Glaumbær rounds out the morning’s theme — a landscape that has always asked something of the people and animals living on it, whether that’s a seal working the tideline or a farming family insulating a house against the dark.

This single day — Illugastaðir, Hvítserkur, Skagafjörður — sits partway along the tour’s full ring-road itinerary, which carries travellers the length of the country from Reykjavík’s museums and geothermal baths to the glacier lagoons of the south coast. It’s a reminder that the pace of an Iceland tour isn’t constant: some days are built around a single national park or glacier, and others, like this one, string together several shorter, contrasting stops along a stretch of coast that most visitors would otherwise drive straight past.

When is the best time of year to see seals at Vatnsnes?

Seals can be seen along the Vatnsnes coast for most of the year, since both grey and harbour seals use these waters as a year-round haul-out site rather than a seasonal stopover. Numbers are generally easiest to see in the warmer months, when calmer seas and longer daylight make spotting them straightforward from the shore. Odyssey’s Iceland tour departs in April and September, and a September departure carries the added chance of seeing the Northern Lights later in the itinerary, on the clear, dark nights further into the tour — though as with any aurora sighting, that’s a matter of conditions on the night rather than something any tour can guarantee.

Onward to Akureyri and Lake Mývatn

From Skagafjörður the road climbs over the Öxnadalsheiði mountain pass and drops into Akureyri, Iceland’s second city and the last major town before the itinerary turns toward the volcanic north. There’s a short guided stop in Akureyri before the group settles in for the night in the Eyjafjörður region, ready for a day given over to geology: the tour continues on to Lake Mývatn, where pseudo-craters, lava fields and bubbling mud pools take over the story two days later. Vatnsnes, by comparison, is the calm before that: a morning of seals, folklore and turf houses that asks nothing more of travellers than a short walk and a willingness to look closely at a landscape that rewards patience rather than scale.

For anyone planning a first trip to Iceland, it’s worth remembering that days like this one are exactly what a small group itinerary is good at protecting. A self-drive visitor pressed for time might cut Vatnsnes from a north-coast route in favour of a longer stop at a better-known glacier; on a guided tour, the peninsula gets its own unhurried morning, seals and stone troll included, before the itinerary moves on to the next chapter of the circumnavigation.