Borgarfjörður Eystri: Puffins, an Elf Rock and One Road In

Why this colony and not another

Iceland has bigger puffin colonies. What it does not have anywhere else is one you can walk into. Hafnarhólmi is a low rocky peninsula behind the working harbour, and the village has built a network of boardwalks and fenced platforms at several heights straight through the nesting ground.

That means no cliff edge, no burrows underfoot to collapse, and no need for a boat or a long lens. Birds land on the turf a metre or two from the rail and get on with their afternoon. At the top there is a wooden hide with benches and viewing slats, which turns a wet day from a write-off into a decent hour.

When they are there

About 10,000 pairs come ashore from mid-April and are gone by mid-August. May through July is the reliable window. In the last two weeks of August the young leave the burrows for open water and the adults follow, so a late-August or September visit finds a rock with a view and no birds on it.

No operator can work around this and the honest ones say so at the point of booking. If your ship calls in September, spend the day on the canyon instead.

What time of day

Puffins spend the middle of the day at sea. The colony is busiest from 7am to 10am and again from 6pm to 10pm, when the adults are arriving with fish or leaving to fetch more.

Cruise coaches land between eleven and two, which is the quiet stretch. You will still see hundreds of birds sitting on the turf; what you will see less of is the traffic in the air. Anyone driving themselves and staying in the area should go in the evening, when the light is also better.

The other birds

Kittiwakes nest on the same rock and are louder and closer to the path than the puffins. Fulmars ride the updraught along the cliff face without appearing to move, and common eiders sit on the water in the harbour with their broods. Nobody comes for these three, and half the photographs people go home with are of them.

What the birds are doing

A puffin pair digs a burrow a metre or so into the turf and raises a single chick in it, which is why the whole hillside is undermined and why the boardwalks exist. Both parents fly out to fish and come back with sand eels held crosswise in the beak, sometimes a dozen at a time, held in place by a hinged jaw and a rough tongue.

The chick, a puffling, stays underground for around six weeks and leaves at night on its own. That departure is what empties the colony in August. Adults spend the rest of the year out on the North Atlantic and touch land only to breed, which makes the four months at Hafnarhólmi the only window anyone gets.

Route 94 and the pass

The road from Egilsstaðir was paved in full only in 2023, which is recent enough that plenty of guidebooks still call it a gravel road. It is not, but it is a mountain road: it climbs to the Vatnsskarð eystri pass on hairpin bends, and at the top there is no guardrail between the tarmac and the drop.

In summer any car handles it. In winter it closes in snow. Coaches from the coast do it every day of the season without drama, and the view over Njarðvík and down into the fjord on the descent is one of the reasons the drive is not wasted time.

Naddi and the cross on the road in

Before the descent into the fjord the road crosses Njarðvíkurskriður, a long unstable scree slope above the sea. A wooden cross stands beside it carrying a Latin inscription and the date 1306.

The story is that a creature called Naddi, human below and beast above, lived in the gully now named after him and attacked travellers after dark until a farmer from Borgarfjörður drove it into the sea. The cross marks the spot and asks passers-by to bow. Coaches do not stop, but you will see it from the window, and the slope it stands on tells you why a road here was a serious undertaking.

Lindarbakki

The most photographed house in East Iceland is a small red timber cottage with turf walls and grass on the roof, standing in the middle of the village. It is a private home, lived in, not a museum, and the polite thing is to photograph it from the road rather than the garden.

The church and the painter

Bakkagerðiskirkja was built in 1901 and holds an altarpiece that Jóhannes Kjarval painted in 1914. Kjarval grew up in this fjord and became the best-known painter in Iceland, and the picture he gave the village is a local joke and a serious work at the same time: Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount, standing on Álfaborg, with the Dyrfjöll behind him.

The church is usually open in summer and there is no charge. It takes five minutes and it is the one thing in the village that explains the place.

Álfaborg, the elf rock

The knoll above the church is called Álfaborg, the elf city, and Icelandic folklore puts the queen of the elves in residence. A path climbs it in a few minutes and there is a view indicator at the top over the fjord and the mountains.

Belief in the hidden people is treated more lightly in Iceland than foreign articles suggest and more seriously than a sceptic expects. Either way it is the best short walk in the village, and the church below it holds an altarpiece by Jóhannes Kjarval, who grew up here and became one of the country's best-known painters.

Storurð and the hiking

Borgarfjörður Eystri is the trailhead for Storurð, a bowl of enormous pale boulders and turquoise pools below the Dyrfjöll mountains, reached on a walk of several hours. It is one of the finest day hikes in the east and it is entirely out of reach on a port call.

What is in reach is the marked network of shorter paths around the fjord, if you are staying in the village rather than passing through. The tourist office keeps a map.

Facilities in the village

Small but real, and better than most places this remote.

• A grocery shop and a fuel pump, which matters on this side of the pass
• Cafés and guesthouses, including a café at the harbour in season
• Toilets at the Hafnarhólmi car park
• The tourist information point for trail maps and the puffin webcam
• Nothing open late, and nothing open at all outside the summer months

How long you need

Most visitors spend fifteen to thirty minutes on the boardwalks, which is what the coaches allow for. That is enough to see the birds and take photographs, and not enough to sit and watch them behave.

With a car and an evening, the better shape of a visit is an hour at the colony around seven, twenty minutes on Álfaborg, and a coffee at the harbour. Off a ship, the five-hour trip gives you an hour at the colony and forty minutes in the village, which is a fair compromise given that nearly three hours of the day is spent on the road.

The village itself

Around 130 people live here, most of them in Bakkagerði, the settlement at the head of the fjord. The Dyrfjöll rise behind it at 1,136 m, named the door mountains for the enormous gap notched through the ridge, which is visible from most of the drive in.

It is a working place rather than a resort. The harbour lands fish, the shop sells groceries, and the season is short enough that most of what is open in July is shut in October. That is the character of it, and the reason a village of 130 people with 10,000 pairs of puffins has boardwalks instead of a ticket office.

Doing it yourself versus taking the coach

With a car, this is a straightforward morning: an hour and a quarter from Egilsstaðir, an hour at the colony, twenty minutes on Álfaborg, a coffee at the harbour, and back. Route 94 is paved, fuel is available in the village, and the only real constraint is the pass in bad weather.

Off a cruise ship the arithmetic changes completely. There is no rental desk in Seyðisfjörður, no bus, and 92.9 km of road each way. The two guided trips exist because there is no alternative, not because the drive is difficult, and their price buys transport rather than access to anything.

The one advantage the coach has is timing. Guides know when the pass is clear, they reorder stops around rain, and they get you back before the gangway closes. The one advantage of a car is that you can be at the colony at seven in the evening, which is when the birds are actually flying.