Iceland Things to Do

With an abundance of guided tours available throughout the peak tourism months, exploring Iceland’s most famous landscapes is made easy, but if you’re visiting in the off-season or attempting a DIY excursion of more remote sights, you’ll need to consider your transport options more carefully.

Just because its name evokes images of snowshoeing and glacier hiking, doesn’t mean Iceland is only a winter destination; in fact, the summer months are one of the most popular times to explore with extended sunlight hours providing the opportunity to continue tours late into the evening. Here are a few suggestions for what to do in Iceland in summer.

With no trains, limited low season transport options and vast unpopulated landscapes, Iceland makes an obvious choice for a road trip and hiring a car or campervan to get around has become a popular option for travelers.Unless you’re arriving by ferry from mainland Europe, hiring a car on arrival is the best option and there’s a wide range of rental outlets that offer limited or unlimited mileage plans with the option to pick up and drop off the vehicle in different locations.

For travelers looking to see the Northern Lights, 2013 may be one of the best times to visit Iceland. According to scientists, the sun is reaching its solar maximum this year, an event that happens every 11 years. The end of this cycle means that the sun is closer to the earth and therefore produces more activity in the Northern Lights, or Aurora Borealis.

As summer ends and the Icelandic days get shorter and the air crisper, it’s time in Iceland to crank up that thermal heating and listen to a good story. Bring on a Saga. The Icelandic Sagas are the ancient stories of the country, they are the Icelanders touchstones of their history, their Acropolis or Great Wall if you know what I mean.

With its colorful buildings, idyllic bays and backdrop of rugged mountains, Reykjavik’s bewitching landscapes look all the more impressive from up above. To inspire you, here are some of the city’s best viewpoints.

1. Hallgímskirkja Church
With its futuristic white façade designed to evoke the country’s basalt lava flows and its towering steeple providing a crucial navigation point, the Hallgrimskirkja Church is Reykjavik’s most iconic building, dating back to 1986. While the Lutheran church paints a striking picture from ground level, the building’s main drawpoint is its open-air viewing platform, situated at the pinnacle of the tower and reachable by elevator. As the sixth tallest building in Iceland, the views from the Hallgrimskirkja are unsurprisingly spectacular, spanning the urban center, the colorful boats of Reykjavik harbor and the vast coastline dotted with distant islands.