The hot water that comes out of a Reykjavik tap has been underground rather than in a boiler. It arrives from geothermal fields outside the city, pumped straight into the pipes, and it smells faintly of sulphur for the first few seconds. Nearly every building in Iceland is heated this way, which is why a country on the edge of the Arctic burns almost nothing to keep warm.

That plumbing is also why the city has around seven municipal swimming pools, all outdoors, all open year round, and all costing 1,500 krónur, roughly 10 euros at September 2026 rates. Heating them costs the city very little, so they were built the way libraries were built elsewhere.

Locals use them constantly, in January, in the rain, in the dark. The Blue Lagoon, 47 kilometres away and around 12,000 krónur to enter on the cheapest ticket, close to 90 euros, is a fine afternoon and is not this.

The pool rules

You must wash naked with soap before entering the water, without a swimsuit, in the communal shower, and there are diagrams on the wall showing which parts. This is enforced by attendants and it is not negotiable. Icelanders keep very little chlorine in the water precisely because everyone washes properly.

Once in, the pool itself is the least of it. The point is the hot pots, small tubs at 38, 40 and 42 degrees around the edge, where people sit and talk. Laugardalslaug is the big one with the slide. Vesturbæjarlaug is smaller and more local. Sundhöllin, Guðjón Samúelsson’s 1937 building in the centre, has the best architecture.

Sky Lagoon, out at Kársnes, is the closer and cheaper answer if you want the infinity-edge photograph without the drive to Grindavík.

Hallgrímskirkja and Harpa

The church on the hill took 41 years to build, from 1945 to 1986, and its concrete facade steps upward in columns meant to suggest basalt, the hexagonal rock that forms when lava cools slowly. At 74.5 metres it is one of the tallest structures in Iceland.

A lift goes up the tower for about 1,400 krónur, and it is the only high viewpoint in the city: coloured tin roofs in every direction, the sea, and Mount Esja across the bay.

Harpa, the concert hall on the harbour, was half-built when the Icelandic banks collapsed in 2008, and the government finished it because stopping would have looked worse than continuing. Its skin is more than a thousand twelve-sided glass units in a quasi-brick pattern developed with Olafur Eliasson, and it changes colour with the sky and the light behind it.

Walking in costs nothing. Go up the stairs to the top level and look out through the glass, which is the real reason to enter.

The northern lights, honestly

They are not visible in summer, at all, because it does not get dark between roughly late May and late July. The season runs September to April, and it needs a clear sky, solar activity and darkness at the same time, which is not a common combination.

The city itself is too bright. Grótta lighthouse at Seltjarnarnes, twenty-five minutes’ walk from the centre, is where locals go, and it is free.

A three-night trip in October has decent odds and a one-night trip has poor ones. Tour operators usually rebook you free if a trip is clouded out, and that policy is the thing to check before paying.

Eating, and what to skip

The hot dog stand by the harbour, Bæjarins Beztu, has been running since 1937 and sells a lamb-based hot dog with raw and crispy onion, ketchup, sweet mustard and remoulade. Say eina með öllu, one with everything. It costs around 700 krónur and there is usually a queue at two in the morning.

Icelandic lamb is worth the money in a restaurant. So is plokkfiskur, mashed fish and potato with butter and rye bread, which is what people actually cook at home.

Fermented shark, hákarl, is a bar dare rather than a food, and no Icelander eats it outside the midwinter feast. Puffin and whale appear on tourist menus and almost nowhere else, and the whaling industry survives largely on visitors ordering it, which is worth knowing before you do.

Alcohol is sold only in Vínbúðin state shops, which close at six most weekdays, an hour later on Fridays, and do not open on Sundays. A beer in a bar runs 1,400 to 1,800 krónur, and happy hour is a serious institution here rather than a marketing phrase.

The old centre, and how small it is

Reykjavik holds about 140,000 people, and the whole of the old town can be crossed on foot in twenty minutes. Laugavegur is the main street, lined with wooden and corrugated-iron houses painted in strong colours because the iron needed protecting and the paint was cheap.

The corrugated iron arrived from Britain in the nineteenth century and became the national building material, which is why a city in the North Atlantic looks the way it does.

Tjörnin, the pond in the middle, is heated at one corner by geothermal water so a patch stays unfrozen all winter and every bird in the area crowds into it. The city hall sits on stilts in the same pond and has a three-dimensional relief map of Iceland inside, free to walk in and look at.

The Golden Circle, if you have the day

Three sites within a 250-kilometre loop east of the city, doable in six to eight hours by hire car or coach. Þingvellir is the rift valley where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart and where the Icelandic parliament met outdoors from 930. Geysir gives its name to every geyser in the world; the original is dormant, and the one that erupts every few minutes is Strokkur. Gullfoss drops the Hvítá river 32 metres in two stages.

Weather closes roads without much warning between October and April, and the site to check is road.is, updated by the road administration through the day.

Iceland sits between two continents in flying time as well as in geology: Dublin is two and a half hours away, Oslo about three.

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