Snæfellsnes in Iceland is supposed to be one of the most attractive parts of the country, and given that we’d been to Iceland a few times already and found it all already extremely attractive (and breath-taking, and enchanting, and humbling, and, well, get your own thesaurus and go crazy here) that got us to wondering “Well, sure, but how much prettier could the Icelandic landscapes be?” We had to find out, of course, because there’s no point travelling if you don’t take a look around, so for this day on our 2022 Sky Princess cruise when we were docked at the port of Grundarfjörður we booked an excursion to take us around the Snæfellsnes Peninsula to see for ourselves.
Our first stop of the day was at Djúpalónssandur, famous for its black sand beach. Black sand is, of course, a shorter way of saying “little bits of volcanic rock spit out from the Earth’s core and deposited by the water” and upon exiting the bus and glancing roughly northwards from the car park above the beach we could see the source of all that volcanic rock. This was Snæfellsjökull, a 700,000-year-old, glacier-topped volcano, last active in the early parts of the first millennium. Not only gorgeous to look at, but also immortalised in the Jules Verne story Journey to the Centre of the Earth as the entrance towards the Earth’s centre.
We had a bit of a wait around the car park because there were toilets there and we were on a cruise ship excursion. Toilets are like Venus Flytraps for cruise ship tourists. They can’t help themselves. They’re compelled to venture inside the sticky surface and remain trapped in there for far longer than you’d think necessary before emerging outside somehow desperate for something with lots of caffeine in it so they can flush their body with more diuretic and repeat the process over and over again.
Eventually, though, our guide led us down the winding, occasionally steep, rocky, grassy, and always pretty Nautastígur path towards the beach.
Djúpalónssandur has a few points of interest, one of those being on the path down to the black sand. A natural hole had formed in one of the walls of dark rock and provided a lovely view back towards the volcano dominating the Snæfellsnes Peninsula skyline. The name of this rock formation is Gatklettur in case you’re wondering whether it had one. Of course it had one.
At the bottom of the path a small lagoon had formed and offered photographers a nice place for reflection. The beach had several lagoons and it’s from them that the name Djúpalónssandur derives and it also explains the name of the path, which translates to Path of the Bulls, and refers to the act of walking cattle down to the lagoon to drink. Drinking the water yourself is not recommended. Fresh water may sit on the surface but it’s by no means guaranteed that you won’t simply get a mouthful of Icelandic sea water instead. I didn’t test this to find out, but if you’re feeling adventurous then fine, go ahead.
Djúpalónssandur’s probably most famous attraction, if you want to call it that, is the rusted remnants of the steam-powered fishing trawler Epine GY7. This British vessel was caught in a blizzard in 1948 and wrecked. Locals managed to get a line to the boat and saved four while one other swam ashore in the freezing conditions and survived, but fourteen lost their lives.
We had some free time to look around and it had been my intention to walk down to the shoreline as many others were doing, but to be honest here, it was all a bit tiring and we didn’t really have enough time to fully explore and do the place complete justice. One thing about the black sand on Djúpalónssandur Black Sand Beach is it’s incredibly giving. That compactness you might find with finer sand isn’t there and the effect is more like putting your hand in a box of marbles rather than laying your hand on dirt. After traipsing across the surface for a few minutes and realising you’re only three metres away from where you started (a slight exaggeration) you might also feel inclined to turn around and head back onto more solid ground.
There is far more to see at Djúpalónssandur than shown here. Cruise excursions, like cruises themselves, are tasters for places, often never quite satisfying enough in their own rights, but rather encouraging you to come back for more if you like what you see. If you like lagoons and volcanic landscapes and morbid history and looking at tall rock formations and thinking “I bet the locals claim that’s a troll turned to stone when the sun hit it” (it will be) then it’s definitely worth a visit if you’re on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula.
In the next part of this cruise travelogue series we’ll continue our drive around the Snæfellsnes Peninsula and make a photo stop near the Malarrif Lighthouse.