Things to do
9-
Eldfell
The cone that did not exist before 23 January 1973, when a fissure opened on the eastern side of the town without warning and built a hill just over 200 metres high. A marked path climbs the red scoria in about half an hour, and the ground near the top is still warm to the hand.
-
Eldheimar
A museum built around a single house at Gerðisbraut 10, dug out of the tephra that buried it in 1973 and left in the state it was found. The excavation began in 2005 under the working name Pompeii of the North, and the museum opened in 2014 at the foot of Eldfell. Around 400 buildings went under in the eruption.
-
Heimaey
The only inhabited island in the archipelago at 13.4 square kilometres, and the largest island off the Icelandic coast, cliffed on three sides with a harbour entrance narrowed by the 1973 lava. A road loops the settled ground and marked paths run the cliff edge. Boat trips around the island reach the sea caves and the seabird ledges.
-
Helgafell
The older cone, 227 metres high and long inactive, thrown up in an eruption around 5,900 years ago that formed much of the present island. It stands less than a kilometre south of Eldfell, green where its neighbour is black, and the climb gives the clearest view of how the 1973 lava narrowed the harbour mouth.
-
Herjólfsdalur
A grassed valley in the northwest of Heimaey, ringed by cliffs and named for Herjólfur, whom some versions of the Landnámabók call the first settler of the islands. An early farmstead has been excavated and partly reconstructed at its head. The valley fills for Þjóðhátíð on the first weekend of August and is a campsite and golf course otherwise.
-
Sæheimar
A small aquarium and natural history collection near the harbour, with tanks of local fish and the island's cabinet of mounted birds. It is best known for the pufflings that island children bring in each August after the birds fledge toward the town lights, kept until they are strong enough to release. It takes under an hour.
-
Skansinn
A harbour fort ordered by Frederick II of Denmark in 1586 to protect the crown's property from English traders and raiders, and overrun in the Turkish Raid of 1627. Part of the site went under lava in 1973. What survives is a low wall on the water, with the reconstructed stave church standing beside it.
-
Stafkirkjan
A stave church at Skansinn, given by Norway in 2000 to mark a thousand years since Iceland accepted Christianity, and built to the pattern of the timber churches of the eleventh century. It stands close to where the islands' first church is thought to have been raised. It is dark, very small, and takes ten minutes.
-
Stórhöfði
The southernmost headland of Heimaey, joined to the rest of the island by a low isthmus and among the windiest measured points in Europe. Its lighthouse has worked since 1906 and the weather station beside it since 1921. A small hide on the slope below is the dependable place to watch puffins from June into August.