When to visit: Iceland is legendary for its unpredictable weather patterns that keep locals and visitors alike on their toes. Price-wise, you’ll find that flights tend to get most expensive during the summer-holiday peaks of June-July and the Christmas period, before dipping again in February. Our cheap flight alerts are generally £40-60 for a return from London airports, and they do come up relatively regularly, so keep your eyes peeled! The country is warmest in June-August (we’re talking highs of 20C), although you’ll also be looking at 13-20 hours of sunlight during these months. Hotels should have blackout blinds, but you might want to invest in a sleep mask just in case. This isn’t just worth considering for the sake of your comfort. During the winter snows, you’ll have fewer options for hiking, and driving conditions might be a bit more stressful (Rough Guides have some great tips more generally for flying, driving or cycling across the country.) But visit in the winter, and some very different options will open up: you’ll be able to enjoy skiing and snowboarding, and check out Iceland’s awesome glacial ice caves. Northern Lights tours also generally won’t start running until September-October, when the ample darkness opens up more opportunities for seeing those elusive colours in the sky. While it’s never wise to plan your trip entirely around seeing the Lights (even with the best planning around weather conditions, you’re never guaranteed to see them), it’s definitely something to consider.
If you aim for September, you’ll just about catch the start of the Northern Lights season, and the end of the whale-watching season, with temperatures hitting highs of 15C and maybe 11 hours of daylight. Iceland boasts a wide variety of live multi-genre music festivals across the calendar year – from summer solstice raves to deep-of-winter parties.
Iceland has an incredible nationwide love of weird folklore and the supernatural – a 2017 survey found that 54% of Icelanders believe in elves – so lovers of fantastical and fearful sights can have a ton of fun here. From the Sea Monster Museum of Bildudalur to Hólmavík’s museum of Witchcraft and Sorcery (which features a grisly exhibit of human skin trousers, entertainingly called the ‘necropants’), there’s a lot of strange cultural sights to check out. But you can also just grab a guide-book and set out into the wilderness – from geothermal mud pools haunted by witches to lava formations that might just be gateways to hell, there’s rarely a natural landmark in Iceland that doesn’t have its own creepy or magical stories underlying it. Iceland also boasts a lot of bizarre and often deeply silly architecture scattered across its landscape. Want to check out a giant red chair perched on a cliff, overlooking a mountain that’s named after Batman? They’ve got you covered. Want to see an abandoned Dr Who-style phone box, or a mysterious (and functioning) toilet in the middle of an empty valley? Iceland has it all. And finally you can book a tour to see some of the bloodiest, wildest, most White Walker-filled locations from the show Game of Thrones.
Reykjavik is one of the safest cities in the world, with free wi-fi pretty much on tap, you can get a Reykjavik City Card for free admission to galleries, museums and swimming pools across the city (here’s a guide to the best pools), as well as free bus travel and extra discounts on restaurants, tours and more. It’s also worth checking out Reykjavik’s many trendy coffee joints – which offer board games, roasting workshops, DJ booths and more. Guide To Iceland also has the scoop on the city’s regular weekly events (scroll right down), many of which are free to enter – from stand-up comedy (sometimes in English) to live music. The City Library has a regular schedule of art, photography and social media workshops, too. We’d single out the quirky indie Bio Paradis cinema, which reopens on July 1st, and shows a mix of edgy cult classics and fan-favourite films with English subtitles.
Anything else to know? While you can expect a lot of English-fluent Icelanders, it’s always useful to have some key phrases prepared. (Famously, Icelanders don’t often use ‘please’ except in formal situations – you can generally substitute ‘takk’, or ‘thanks’ when ordering food or drink.) Guide To Iceland has some great advice on saving money. A lot of websites warn against visiting 10-11, one of the country’s most widespread but expensive supermarkets – with a nasty habit of apparently jacking up their prices at night. Here’s a beards-and-bellies-filled demonstration of glima, Iceland’s belt-tugging Viking martial art. If you book a car, Two Wandering Soles has some good advice around affordable rentals