Post: The Vestmannaeyjar (Westman) Islands & a Spectacular Waterfall

Imagine you’re at home one dark January evening. You’ve got your three kids to bed and your spouse is drifting off to sleep too. As you tidy the remains of the day, you hear fireworks. Odd. In a community of 5300 people, you’d know if there were a celebration.

Then you look out the window. And it seems as though fire is erupting in the sky.

That was the actual experience for those who lived in Heimaey, the town off the Westman Islands on January 23, 1973. Today we visited the dome left behind from the eruption, and saw a unique museum build around one particular home that was buried in the ash and dust.

We had an early start and after breakfast at our hotel, drove to the ferry for the 40 minute trip to Heimaey (hay-may). The ferry was nearly empty, and looked really new, modern and clean. There was even a little room for kids, playing the movie Frozen (in Icelandic).

It was very quiet in town when we docked. We took our time walking through town on our way to the volcano. The center of town has a church, a monument, and the tidiest and cleanest graveyard I have ever seen.

The volcano museum, Eldheimer,wasn’t open yet, so we climbed the volcano dome first. It was likely the strongest gusts of wind I’ve ever hiked in.

In the middle image, above, you can see two brown hills in the distance behind the church. The one on the far right has been there for a long time. The one on the left did not exist at all before January 1973. It grew from the eruption that lasted six months. That’s the one we climbed.

We hiked up new land, named Eldfell, that hadn’t existed when I was born, and had a beautiful view of the town and the ocean beyond.

Once we descended, we were able to visit Eldheimar museum. It’s brilliant. The museum is build around a home that was buried in the eruption. The home has been partially excavated so you can really appreciate the force of nature that took place. The family that lived in the house was the one I wrote about in the beginning of this post.

As impressive as the geology is, the human story is also very captivating. Only one person died due to the volcano, and that was from gas inhalation. Everyone was evacuated by boat to the mainland, mostly to Reykjavik. After six months, people we permitted to return. Virtually every surface in town had to be shoveled and cleaned. Geothermal heat was able to supply the town for a few years with no drilling or extra energy needed to heat water.

The museum also houses galleries about Surtsey, a new island in the Westmans due to an eruption in 1963. This formed over four years and is about two miles in size. A UNESCO site, it is being studied carefully since it is a model for how plants and animals colonize new land.

We made our way to the folk museum next. This is a thoughtfully and locally curated set of exhibits about life on the island. I was especially taken with this school project that the third grades completed this past year:

The students were asked to show what the town looked like on January 23, 1973. You can see that they put two domes in their model. These students are too young to remember the land before Eldfell— and of course, the dome took six months to form— not one day. It is a wonderful project, and an example of an excellent active learning project!

We took the ferry back to the mainland and made a jaunt to a really popular waterfall, Seljalandsfoss. The waterfall is over 200 feet, and you can walk behind it. The spray and sun make rainbows.

We were able to finish the day with a short walk in the area around this waterfall. Here is some vegetation, and a sheep, eating Angelica!