Medium and larger cruise ships will dock at Sundahofn in Reykjavík. It’s to the east of the main part of Iceland’s capital city, and just south of the island of Viðey which is the view that greeted us as we opened our curtains in our room on the last port stop of this Sky Princess Norway and Iceland cruise.
Viðey was under consideration as a potential destination to explore by us before we arrived at Reykjavík for the reason that we knew the ship would be close to the ferry crossing and with us having been to Iceland twice before in 2015 and 2018, we’d done a lot of the excursion options on offer and had spent several days in Reykjavík overall. However, we were concerned that there wouldn’t be a whole lot to actually do on the island and this seemed borne out by our first views of it.
We decided quickly that we’d simply head into the capital instead and try to find a few things we’d not been able to see before. The daily guide on Princess ships is called the Princess Patter and we could see that a shuttle bus option was independently run and therefore not free. That, plus the fact that we knew from experience that Reykjavík is pretty walkable, and we tend to walk if we can, made us decide we’d get some mild exercise on a stroll into the city instead. That gave us a chance to take part in the morning trivia with a far emptier ship than on a sea day which made winning it that much easier.
The walking route we took in Reykjavík was the shore walk – it may not have been the most direct path but you can never get too much of that sea air – and this ended up taking us into the Laugarnes quarter of the city. This is an area of Reykjavík that has previously housed the bishop, a leper colony, and barracks for the military during World War II but there’s little indication of any of those former roles these days. Instead, you get rocky coastlines, tufts of windswept grasses, and views across flat water to mountainous landscapes. You’re in Iceland. What else were you expecting?
Sigurjón Ólafsson was born in 1908 in the south of the country. He studied and sculpted in Denmark until 1945, winning numerous awards for his realistic and then increasingly abstract art pieces in a variety of media. When he returned to Iceland it was here in Laugarnes that he set up home on what was barracks during the war and he was sculpting pieces up until his death in 1982. His wife then transformed and expanded their home into an art gallery and both inside and out you can now view some of his art pieces. If you like modern abstract art – and we do – then this is a delightful place to wander past and appreciate a bit of culture, and if you’re walking from the cruise ship port in Reykjavík to the city centre then it’s barely out of your way at all.
We like bracing views and weird art so we adored picking this path to walk on the way from Sky Princess to Reykjavík and recommend it not only for these sculptures but also – and mostly – for what will be in the next post in this cruise travelogue series. The next thing we would come across might just happen to be our most favourite spot in the entire Icelandic capital to explore: The Recycled House.