Iceland's problem is not Iceland. It is the Ring Road. Everyone who comes here drives the same eight-day loop, stops at the same six waterfalls, and reports back that the country was beautiful and a little crowded. We pull our travelers off it on day three, point them northwest, and they come back with a different country in their heads.
The Westfjords are the part of Iceland that sticks out into the North Atlantic like a hand with the fingers spread wide. There are no major roads through them, only a single coastal route that bends in and out of every fjord. There are forty thousand people in the entire region. There is one traffic light. There are puffins, sea cliffs, fishing villages, hot springs nobody has named on the internet, and a quality of silence that the southern coast has not had in fifteen years.
This is what we send travelers there for. And this is roughly what we have them do.
Get there slowly
Most of the time we recommend driving up. The road from Reykjavík takes about six hours, but we plan it as a full day with two stops — one for coffee in the small town of Borgarnes, one for a long lunch at a farm-to-table restaurant in the Snæfellsnes peninsula on the way north. By the time you cross into the Westfjords proper, somewhere around the inlet at Bjarkalundur, the country has emptied out. You will pass another car every few minutes instead of every few seconds.
If your trip is short, there is a tiny propeller plane that flies from Reykjavík to Ísafjörður in forty minutes. The landing is among the more dramatic in commercial aviation. We tell travelers about it; few choose it.
Where to stay
There is a guesthouse on the southern Westfjords coast — eleven rooms, a single chef, a turf roof, and a view across the fjord that does not feel quite real on the first morning. The chef cooks one menu per night, which depends on whatever the local boats brought in that day. Most evenings it is haddock or langoustine, butter, dill, potatoes from a farm fifteen kilometres away. There is no wine list; he picks. You eat at one of four communal tables. By the second night you know the other guests by name.
This is the place we build most Westfjords trips around. Two nights minimum; three if you can spare them.
What to do with the days
Látrabjarg. The westernmost point of Europe, a fourteen-kilometre stretch of sea cliff that rises 440 metres straight out of the North Atlantic. From May to August it is the largest puffin colony in the world. Unlike most puffin sites in Iceland, the birds at Látrabjarg are not afraid of humans — you can sit at the cliff edge and have one land a metre away. Bring a windproof jacket. The drive in is on a gravel road that requires patience.
Rauðasandur. A red-sand beach an hour from the guesthouse, hidden at the bottom of a long, steep, single-lane track. Most days you will be the only people on it. There is a small farmhouse café at the top of the track that serves cake and coffee. Take both, walk the beach, sit on the cliffs.
Hot springs. The Westfjords are full of small geothermal pools that locals built decades ago — a few stones in a hillside, a wooden ladder, a view. Two of them, Krosslaug and Reykjafjarðarlaug, are reachable from the southern coast and almost always empty. We will mark them on your map. Do not expect signage.
Ísafjörður. The capital of the region, with eight hundred years of history and about twenty-six hundred people. There is a maritime museum in an eighteenth-century warehouse, a bakery that opens at six, and a restaurant inside an old fish factory where a young chef from Copenhagen is doing some of the most interesting cooking in the country. Spend a night here on the way in or out.
When to go
Late June through early August is the sweet spot — long days, accessible roads, puffins on the cliffs, fields green enough to surprise you. September is also wonderful, and quieter still, but the weather can turn. We do not generally send travelers to the Westfjords between November and April; many roads close, the propeller plane gets cancelled often, and the guesthouse takes its winter break.
The Ring Road, briefly
None of the above means the south coast is not worth seeing. We usually combine the Westfjords with two or three nights in the south — a glacier walk on Vatnajökull, a long evening at Jökulsárlón lagoon, an aurora-watching cabin off the grid in autumn. The point is simply that the south is what people come to Iceland for, and the Westfjords are what they remember.