What does a city break look like at the Arctic's edge?

If you want a full, unadulterated reminder of what you ate for breakfast, go whale watching immediately afterwards. The wooden boat lurches on Eyjafjord like a tipsy foal. So confident at the dock, yet so humiliated by the Atlantic’s bullish tug. Somewhere in my digestive tract, smoked fish and filter coffee tango, spinning like a sock-laden washing machine in its death throes. While half the boat fights to keep their toast down, the other half scans the horizon, desperate to spot the humpback whale. These krill-devouring titans spend approximately 22 hours a day hoovering the ocean like deep-sea Dysons. But today? Nowhere to be seen. The captain and crew survey the waters with binoculars from the upper deck, eyes squinting at the frigid, white nothingness. In the absence of a sighting, there’s only one logical solution to employ to lure these disporting mammals from the inky depths: Celine Dion.

 A humpback whale swims up to the freezing waters' surface in Eyjafjord

Views of the recently opened Forest Lagoon taken from above

'My Heart Will Go On' plays from a crackling speaker, and within moments, the barnacle-encrusted backs of three humpback whales break the water’s surface. Either die-hard Dion fans, paid actors, or cunning leviathans with plans to sink the ship Titanic-style, they ceremoniously spurt a few dozen litres of water from their blowholes, coquettishly flick their flukes and dive back down, deep into the Atlantic snack drawer. It’s my first ever sighting of the sixth largest mammal on earth during a visit to one of the world’s smallest cities.

In the UK, a population of 19,000 might place you in a town like Dorking. In Iceland, however, it makes you its second city: Akureyri. Positioned deep within the cradle of Eyjafjordur, Akureyri is so small that if you cross the water to face it, you can see its entirety from end to end. Once only accessible by a five-hour drive or 40-minute flight from the capital Reykjavík, the city was little known to the UK. But with direct flights now taking off from London and Manchester, it’s no longer so remote.

On paper, Akureyri has many of the hallmarks of a city. There’s an art gallery, a theatre, a large regional hospital, six museums, offices with signs that read KPMG, Deloitte and PWC, and a landmark church Akureyrarkirkja, designed by the same Icelandic architect who created the iconic Hallgrimskirkja in Reykjavík. Mosey down to the main drag on a Saturday night, and you can fuel up on Björk Daiquiris in a bar called R5, make poor decisions at nightclub Vamos (yep, Vamos) and stumble into Kurdo Kebab for a restorative doner. But in practice, how could a place positioned 30km from the Arctic Circle in one of the most tectonically active places on earth with a population the size of Pontefract be remotely similar to any city you’ve ever visited before? Which begs the question, what actually makes a city, anyway?

Lake Mývatn

In the whiplash-inducing world of tech cities, garden cities, megacities and smart cities, the criterion for what comprises a city remains opaque. To Henry VIII, it wasn’t the size that mattered but the exertion of spiritual power, which practically speaking meant the presence of a diocesan cathedral. In classical civilisations like Ancient Greece, cities were differentiated from towns by their relative size and sophistication compared to the hinterland – centres of governance and culture. In Athens and Sparta, agoras were the hallmarks of cities, a central gathering place for all walks of life to debate, trade and exchange ideas. Baghdad and Córdoba were cities because of their role as intellectual and spiritual centres, marked by mosques, madrasas, and bazaars. 21st-century metropolises’ like New York or Shanghai are megacities because they’re sprawling hubs of finance and culture connected through technology and trade. One of the most universal definitions of a city is by sociologist Richard Sennett, who says they are places where strangers meet; where new ideas are formed in a public space. A common ground. If the aforementioned is true for Akureyri, the best place to test this theory would be a swimming pool. While you’d head to the pub to meet a Londoner or a cafe to encounter a Parisian, they say if you want to meet an Icelandic, go to the public baths – a focal social point to meet from dawn until dusk.

Mývatn baths

Thankfully, Akureyri is well-endowed in the swimming pool department. A total of six, to be exact, in the city and the surrounding area. Such an abundance of swimming pools might seem bizarre in a place with as much UV exposure as a basement, but with Iceland’s underlying geology, a proliferation of piscines makes sense. It can be hard to imagine, particularly during my visit, as a deluge of snow has sealed a thick, white lid on Akureyri, but the landscape concealed underneath seethes. It’s the only country in the world that sits on a major tectonic plate divergence, which splices the country from the Reykjanes Peninsula in the southwest to the northeast near the Mývatn baths, meaning the earth quite literally splits apart here to show you its innards. Vistas are borderline hallucinatory, a starkly elemental display of scorched volcanic craters, gurgling mud, belching lava and steaming fissures. A nifty byproduct of such abundant tectonic activity is that the geothermal energy below ground heats boreholes of water pumped into baths and swimming pools, hence their ubiquity.

Vistas are borderline hallucinatory, a starkly elemental display of scorched volcanic craters, gurgling mud, belching lava and fissures

I swim in three pools while I’m here: the local spot Sundlaug Akureyrar, the Forest Lagoon and the Mývatn Nature Baths. The latter, fed by naturally heated water in the nearby Bjarnarflag geothermal area, is perfumed with the only smell synonymous with both wellness and an egg sandwich: sulphur. The milky blue waters here are punctuated with bobble hat-clad bathers, some soaking, others talking, and several putting the world to rights over an Aperol (the Viking drink of choice) poured at the wooden swim-up bar. In many ways, you might call it an Icelandic agora. It would be easy to assume that this furious tectonic activity doesn’t mix well with human existence (see: Pompeii). However, with no impending risk of nearby cataclysmic volcanic eruptions, geothermal energy is, in many ways, the lifeblood of Akureyri. Not only used to heat homes and swimming pools, it is inextricably linked to Akureyri’s food scene. 

Geothermal-heated greenhouses supply fruit and vegetables to many local restaurants, some of which I try at North by Dill, the sibling to the Michelin-starred restaurant Dill in Reykjavík, including a salad of tomatoes, ricotta, onion and tarragon you’d expect to thrive in warmer climes. Breadmaking here is equally tied to blistering subterranean heat, where geyser bread, a dense, cake-like rye bread, is baked in milk cartons in curious underground ovens powered by the heat of nascent volcanoes. Tour guide by day, opera singer by night Gísli Rúnar Víossðn drives me to Vogafjós to try it for the first time, where it’s served with smoked Arctic char and dill-spiked skyr or simply churned into bread ice cream. Not just a restaurant, Vogafjós is also a working dairy farm with table-to-stable views of the herd that can be enjoyed with or without a metaphor-inducing bowl of beef goulash.

Vogafjós restaurant is also a working dairy farm

Alongside the pulsing heat below ground, the desolate, frigid conditions above it are equally responsible for shaping the food in Akureyri. “We have a joke in Iceland that if it’s rotting, we like to eat it!” exclaims Jon Thor Benediktsson, who runs The Travelling Viking Tours with his wife Rachel Wilkinson. As an island nation with a latitude not far off polar with ground that can remain frozen for around five months a year, Icelandic cuisine was historically dictated by the edibility of wildlife and the need to preserve it. While probably not the snack of choice for those with a sensitive disposition, putrefied shark is a delicacy, explains Benediktsson. Consuming Greenland shark would typically be poisonous because of its cyanic acid content, but some centuries ago, locals discovered if you buried the carcass and left it to ferment for a few months, your dinner didn’t have to be a death wish. 

Locals discovered if you buried the greenland shark carcass and left it to ferment for a few months, your dinner didn’t have to be a death wish

Unless you’re feasting on a llama poached from Vauxhall City Farm or a London commuter (which I’m under good authority has zero nutritional value), more often than not, food in cities hails from far outside its borders. But for a place as dinky as Akureyri, all it takes is a ten-minute drive with Víossðn along sinuous roads from Akureyri towards Godafoss to encounter foaming, fast rivers teeming with Arctic char and salmon and lowlands freckled with sheep and Icelandic horses. The latter, known for their sturdiness, short stature and unique extra gait (the tolt), is a delicacy, explains Víossðn, alongside sheep head, ram testicles, and volcanic ash-preserved eggs. Regrettably unable to try the eggs, which Víossðn declares “taste like death”, I do try smoked lamb while I’m here, served sliced thinly at Vogafjós. It’s delicate and slightly chewy, with a flavour akin to running your tongue along the rim of an ashtray. When I ask Víossðn what wood is used to smoke the lamb, seeing as Iceland is pretty much a treeless nation, he turns to me, raises his eyebrows, lips pressed into a wry smile, “Sheep shit, of course!”

In Akureyri, the landmarks that take centre stage are those constructed by nature. You can access many of them on the 150-mile Diamond Circle linked to Akureyri by the mammoth Ring Road that encircles Iceland. Víossðn drives us east to the highlands around Lake Mývatn, pitted with ghostly volcanic craters you’d only spot elsewhere in Hawaii. Like so many civilisations that co-exist with vulcanism, folklore and legend salts everything. We pull up at Godafoss, a god-scale waterfall where a biblical wall of water pours furiously into a chasm that feels as deep, if not deeper, than the search for the remote control down a sofa crack. It is said that when Iceland converted to Christianity, Iceland’s leader chucked all of his pagan dolls here into the Skjalfandafljot River. Like any god with a backbone, the betrayal struck quite a nerve, and they split the river into two, forming the waterfall and the seemingly bottomless void into which it pours. Down the road at the Dimmuborgir lava fields, it’s not gods you’ll encounter but rather Yule Lads, a group of 13 Christmas trolls who leave potatoes in the shoes of naughty children.

Yule Lads in Dimmuborgir

What I admire most about Akureyri is how city life continues in circumstances that would give most Londoners a nervous breakdown. A blizzard so thick you can’t see the bonnet of your car? Just keep driving! Forget the toilet roll and realise it’s -10°C outside? Pop on your coat – it’s three-ply or bust. Trying to expand the Mývatn Nature Baths and accidentally discover Iceland’s largest lava cave during construction. Whoopsie daisy! No trees for smoking your winter’s lamb stash? Pas de problem! Sheep poo will suffice. And yet, despite these circumstances and conditions that seem hellbent on testing a human existence, Akureyri is a determined little city that insists on normalcy, notwithstanding the reputation of its latitude.