Akureyri is Iceland's second urban centre, about twenty thousand people at the head of Eyjafjordur in the north of the country, sixty kilometres from the Arctic Circle. Calling it Iceland's second city is technically true and misleading: it is a town the size of a small English market town, and it functions as the capital of everything north of the Reykjavik region, with the hospital, the university, the airport and the shops that the whole north uses.
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What makes it worth basing yourself here rather than driving through is that northern Iceland's major sights are all within two hours: Myvatn, Godafoss, Dettifoss, Husavik for whales, the Asbyrgi canyon and the Trollaskagi peninsula. Akureyri is where you sleep, eat properly and do your laundry in between.
It is also, oddly, a sheltered place. Eyjafjordur is sixty kilometres long and the mountains on both sides block the worst of the weather, so Akureyri is warmer and calmer than its latitude suggests and has a botanical garden, Lystigardurinn, that grows things which have no business at sixty five degrees north. The town is green in a way almost nowhere else in Iceland is.
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What Is Here
Akureyrarkirkja is the building in the photograph at the top of this page and it sits at the top of a flight of steps above the town. Finished in 1940 to a design by Gudjon Samuelsson, the state architect who also did Reykjavik's Hallgrimskirkja, it is concrete, basalt-columnar in its massing, and considerably better than photographs suggest. Inside there is a model ship hanging in the nave, a north Icelandic tradition, and a central window that came from Coventry Cathedral before the bombing.
The botanical garden is the local surprise and it is free. Founded in 1912 by the women of Akureyri, it holds almost every Icelandic native plant plus several thousand foreign species that survive here and nowhere else in the country, and in July it is genuinely lush. For anyone who has driven across the interior it is a strange and welcome thing.
The town centre is small: a pedestrianised main street, Hafnarstraeti, a few good restaurants, the Akureyri Art Museum, the Christmas Garden out of town, and the famous RED HEART-SHAPED TRAFFIC LIGHTS, installed after the 2008 financial collapse as a civic gesture and never removed.
Hlidarfjall is Iceland's best ski area and it is ten minutes above the town. It runs from roughly December to April, with a long season by Icelandic standards, floodlit pistes in the dark months and views down the fjord. This is not an Alpine resort and it is the real thing for Icelandic skiers.
The sights you base here for: GODAFOSS, forty five minutes east, where the lawspeaker is said to have thrown his pagan idols when Iceland converted in the year 1000; MYVATN, an hour and a half east, a shallow volcanic lake with pseudocraters, lava formations at Dimmuborgir and the Hverir geothermal field; HUSAVIK, an hour north, which is Europe's whale watching capital and where the boats are run by people who used to hunt them; and the Trollaskagi peninsula north west, with Siglufjordur, Hofsos and some of the best road scenery in the country.
In winter Akureyri is one of the best aurora bases in Iceland, because it is far enough north, has clear nights more often than the south coast, and you can be out of the town's lights in five minutes.
When to Go
June to August for the daylight and the roads, late September to March for the aurora, and the two trips are completely different.
Summer gives you near twenty four hour light in June, with the midnight sun just below the horizon, temperatures of around ten to fifteen degrees and occasionally twenty, every road open and the whale watching at its peak. It is the obvious season and the busy one.
Winter runs from around minus five to plus two, with four to five hours of usable daylight in December, snow, and the aurora. The town functions normally; the roads beyond it are a different matter and the mountain passes and interior routes close. Hlidarfjall is open. If the northern lights are your purpose, late September to late March and a minimum of four or five nights to allow for cloud.
The shoulder months, May and late September to October, are the best value: roads mostly open, some aurora, and a fraction of the people.
The weather here changes faster than visitors expect and the FCDO's advice to check conditions before every driving day is not a formality. A road that is clear at nine can be closed by eleven.
Getting There
There are domestic flights from Reykjavik in about forty five minutes and a direct international service in season. Akureyri airport is five minutes from the town centre. The domestic flight from Reykjavik city airport saves five hours of driving and is often cheap, which makes a north Iceland trip far more feasible than people assume.
By road from Reykjavik it is about three hundred and ninety kilometres and four and a half to five hours on Route 1, the ring road, in good conditions. In winter that journey needs checking on the day and can take considerably longer or be impossible.
Buses run along the ring road and are slow and infrequent. Most visitors drive, and this is the part of the trip that needs the most thought.
If you hire a car in Iceland there is one clause worth knowing before you sign, and the FCDO states it rather than hinting at it: THE WEATHER CAN CAUSE DAMAGE TO RENTAL CARS THAT IS NOT COVERED BY INSURANCE. Strong winds are common and throw up sand and ash that strips paintwork, and in its own words BRITISH TOURISTS HAVE HAD TO PAY LARGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY to repair hire cars damaged that way. Sand and ash protection is sold as a separate product by most Icelandic hire companies and is the one add-on that is usually worth taking. Two related points: BREAKDOWN RECOVERY COSTS IN REMOTE AREAS CAN BE VERY HIGH, and OFF-ROAD DRIVING IS STRICTLY CONTROLLED and illegal outside marked tracks, with large fines, because the vegetation does not recover.
Icelandic driving rules differ from British ones in ways that carry fines of up to about five hundred pounds, and the FCDO lists them. KEEP DIPPED HEADLIGHTS ON YEAR ROUND, day and night, which is a legal requirement. Speed limits are lower than in the UK and the DRINK DRIVING LIMIT IS LOWER TOO. Suitable tyres are required, including winter tyres when conditions call for them. A UK photocard licence is valid for thirty days. Beyond the rules, the conditions are the thing: the weather changes fast, distances between towns are far greater than the map suggests, SOME MAIN ROUTES ARE GRAVEL OR DIRT, and some roads and bridges are SINGLE LANE WITH PASSING AREAS. Highland and interior F-roads need four wheel drive, open only for a short part of the summer, and where they cross rivers the instruction is to DRIVE AT FIVE TO TEN KILOMETRES AN HOUR and to understand that RIVER LEVELS CAN CHANGE WITHIN THE SAME DAY. Check the Icelandic Road Administration before every driving day rather than once at the start of the trip.
Locally the town is small and walkable, hilly between the harbour and the church, and the buses are free within Akureyri, which is a pleasant surprise.
Is Akureyri Safe for Women Travelers
The FCDO publishes no advised-against areas anywhere in Iceland and the country has no /regional-risks page, so there is no partial advisory behind the summary. On terrorism it is unusually mild by its own standards, saying that ALTHOUGH THERE IS NO RECENT HISTORY OF TERRORISM IN ICELAND, ATTACKS CANNOT BE RULED OUT. On crime it says levels are LOW, with petty theft and antisocial behaviour PARTICULARLY AROUND BARS IN DOWNTOWN REYKJAVIK, which is the only location it names in the whole country. What the landing page does carry is a named VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS warning, and the detail there matters more than the headline: the eruptions since December 2023 have affected THE TOWN OF GRINDAVIK AND THE SURROUNDING AREA, and the FCDO states plainly that THE CAPITAL CITY, REYKJAVIK, KEFLAVIK INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT AND THE REST OF ICELAND HAVE NOT BEEN AFFECTED. So this is a named-town situation rather than a country-level one, which is the opposite of how a reader skimming headlines would take it.
Iceland is consistently ranked the safest country in the world and Akureyri is a town of twenty thousand people within it, so personal safety is genuinely not the question here. The FCDO's only named crime location in the entire country is "around bars in downtown Reykjavik", four hundred kilometres south. Violent crime against visitors is close to statistically absent, English is universal, and a woman travelling alone here is unremarkable to the point of invisibility. Saying the warning does not reach here matters as much as repeating it would.
One sentence on Iceland's safety page deserves to be read twice, because it names the three things that actually hurt visitors and all three are things people come here to look at: GOING TOO CLOSE TO THE OCEAN, CLIFF EDGES AND HOT SPRINGS ARE COMMON CAUSES OF ACCIDENTS IN ICELAND. That is not a generic caution. The ocean here produces sneaker waves, which run far higher up a beach than the sets before them with no visible warning and which have killed people standing on black sand looking out to sea. Cliff edges in Iceland are frequently unfenced, often undercut, and made of material that gives way. Hot springs and mud pots are at or near boiling, the ground around them can be a thin crust over water at that temperature, and the burns are severe. The rule in all three cases is the same and it is unglamorous: keep back further than feels necessary, never turn your back on the sea, and stay on the boardwalks and marked paths in a geothermal area.
And in northern Iceland the hot springs clause is the live one. The Myvatn area is geothermal: Hverir is a field of boiling mud pots and fumaroles with a thin crust in places, the ground temperature is lethal rather than uncomfortable, and the only thing between a visitor and a serious burn is staying on the marked paths. The Myvatn Nature Baths are the managed version. Do not test the ground, do not step over a rope, and keep children and anyone unsteady close.
Iceland runs a national system for exactly the situation a visitor gets into and the FCDO points at it by name. SAFETRAVEL ICELAND publishes route conditions and hazard guides and LETS YOU LODGE A TRAVEL PLAN, so that if you do not return someone knows where to look, and the FCDO's own instruction is to leave your plans and contact details either with your hotel or on Safe Travel. Alongside it, the Icelandic Met Office carries weather and aurora and seismic alerts, the Road Administration carries road status, and 112 is both the emergency number and an app that transmits your position to the rescue services. None of that costs anything, and in a country where SEARCH AND RESCUE MAY BE LIMITED IN SOME AREAS, which the FCDO says plainly because Iceland is inside the Arctic Circle, using it is the difference between an incident and a statistic.
Two small legal points, and the first runs the opposite way from most of Europe. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO CARRY YOUR PASSPORT IN ICELAND. The FCDO suggests carrying some form of identification such as a photocard driving licence or a copy of your passport photo page, and keeping the passport itself somewhere safe, which is a welcome contrast to Poland, Czechia and Slovenia where carrying identification is a requirement. And IT IS ILLEGAL TO SMOKE OR USE AN E-CIGARETTE in restaurants, bars, on public transport and in public buildings, with a fine attached. Riding an electric scooter after drinking is treated as drink driving.
The dark and the weather are the real risks and both are about judgement rather than danger. In December there are four or five hours of usable light, which means an ambitious day plan ends in the dark on an unlit road; and the Icelandic habit of weather changing within the hour means a clear morning is not a forecast. The practical measures are the ones Safe Travel exists for: check road.is and vedur.is before every driving day, lodge your plan, do not drive to a schedule, and accept that the plan changes.
The Akureyri Packing List
A sheltered northern fjord town, four hours of winter daylight, geothermal ground nearby and weather that turns.
Merino base layers, and in Iceland this is the whole system rather than a layer
Our merino base layers are 100% Australian merino at 17.5 micron, and a long sleeve merino wool base layer for women is the single most important thing you will bring to Iceland in any month. Icelandic weather does not do steady states: you will be warm walking, cold standing at a waterfall in spray, wet from horizontal rain and then indoors in fierce heating, repeatedly, within one day. Wool keeps insulating when it is damp and does not chill you when you stop moving, which is exactly the Icelandic problem, and the locals have known it for a thousand years. A merino base layer bottom is not optional from October to April and is worth having in July if the north coast or a boat is in your plan.
A genuinely windproof shell, which matters more here than the waterproofing
A Marmot PreCip Eco rain jacket. Icelandic rain is horizontal and the wind is the thing that beats you: what you need is a hood that cinches down and stays up, closable cuffs and a cut that does not balloon. A jacket that fails in wind makes a whale watching trip or a waterfall stop miserable rather than merely wet.
A fleece and a real insulated jacket
A Columbia Fast Trek fleece year round, and a waterproof insulated parka from October to April. Aurora watching is standing still outdoors at minus five for an hour or more, which is the condition insulation exists for, and whale watching boats are colder than the shore by a large margin in any month.
Head, hands and feet
A merino beanie and warm gloves from September to May, which here are wind items as much as temperature ones. Footwear with real grip is the single most practical safety item in Iceland in winter, because the pavements and the paths ice over and stay iced; Icelanders use strap-on spikes over ordinary boots and they are sold everywhere locally for very little.
Shoes for geothermal boardwalks and lava
Salomon X Ultra 4 GTX shoes, with merino hiking socks under them. The Myvatn lava fields and Dimmuborgir are sharp broken basalt, the geothermal boardwalks at Hverir are wet and slick, and waterfall viewpoints are permanently soaked. Waterproof is essential rather than useful.
The small things
A swimsuit, which is not optional in Iceland: every town has a geothermal pool, Akureyri's is excellent, and you will use it more than you expect. The 112 Iceland app, downloaded before you travel. A sleep mask in summer, because June light does not stop. A power bank for cold weather, which halves phone battery life. Sunglasses, because low-angle northern light off snow and water is strong. A reusable bottle, since Icelandic tap water is among the best in the world and bottled water here is an absurdity. And no passport requirement to carry, unusually: Iceland does not require it, though some identification is sensible.
Recommended Tours and Experiences
Essential Resources for Women in Akureyri
Emergency numbers: 112 reaches police, ambulance, fire and mountain and sea rescue from any phone including a locked mobile, and English is spoken. Download the 112 Iceland app before you travel: it sends your GPS position to the emergency services with one button and logs your location periodically so you can be found, which is the single most useful free thing a visitor to Iceland can do. For non-urgent medical advice the health service line is 1700.
Before every driving day, check road.is for road status and closures and vedur.is for the weather and alerts, both of which publish in English. Lodge your travel plan with Safe Travel Iceland or with your accommodation, which is what the FCDO asks for and what the Icelandic search and rescue system is built around. Both are free.
US State Department travel advisory: the Iceland advisory. Read the current level there directly rather than relying on a figure printed in any guide.
UK FCDO travel advice: gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/iceland, and read the safety and security page rather than only the landing page, because that is where the substance sits.
Main hospital: Akureyri Hospital, Sjukrahusid a Akureyri, is the second largest hospital in Iceland and the referral centre for the entire north, which makes this town the medical anchor of a quarter of the country. The national hospital is Landspitali in Reykjavik. A UK Global Health Insurance Card or an EU European Health Insurance Card gives you state-provided medically necessary care in Iceland on the same terms as a resident, which is not the same as free: Iceland charges patient co-payments for primary care and outpatient visits, so expect to pay something and keep the receipts. Travel insurance still matters and matters more here than in most of Europe, because the FCDO notes that EMERGENCY MEDICAL ASSISTANCE AND SEARCH AND RESCUE MAY BE LIMITED IN SOME AREAS and because an evacuation from a remote part of the country is expensive. Tap water is among the best in the world and buying bottled is pointless; the hot tap smells of sulphur because it is geothermal, which is harmless. Pharmacies are apotek.
Official health authority: the Directorate of Health of Iceland. AKUREYRI HOSPITAL is the SECOND LARGEST IN ICELAND and the referral centre for the entire north, which makes this town of twenty thousand the medical anchor of a quarter of the country; the national hospital is LANDSPITALI in Reykjavik. A UK GHIC or EU EHIC covers medically necessary state care on resident terms, though ICELAND CHARGES PATIENT CO-PAYMENTS so expect to pay something and keep receipts. The FCDO notes that EMERGENCY MEDICAL ASSISTANCE AND SEARCH AND RESCUE MAY BE LIMITED IN SOME AREAS because Iceland is inside the Arctic Circle. DOWNLOAD THE 112 ICELAND APP, which sends your GPS position to the emergency services at one button
US Embassy: the United States Embassy in Reykjavik.
Official tourism authority: the Icelandic Tourist Board. AKUREYRI IS THE BASE FOR THE WHOLE NORTH and everything major is within two hours: GODAFOSS forty five minutes east, MYVATN an hour and a half, HUSAVIK an hour north for whale watching, and the TROLLASKAGI peninsula north west. DOMESTIC FLIGHTS FROM REYKJAVIK TAKE FORTY FIVE MINUTES and save five hours of driving, which makes a north Iceland trip far more feasible than people assume. THE BOTANICAL GARDEN, founded in 1912 by the women of the town, grows several thousand foreign species that survive nowhere else in Iceland and is free. HLIDARFJALL above the town is the country's best ski area, roughly December to April. CHECK ROAD.IS AND VEDUR.IS BEFORE EVERY DRIVING DAY and lodge a plan with SAFE TRAVEL ICELAND, both free
Fly from Reykjavik rather than driving. Forty five minutes against five hours, often cheap, and the airport is five minutes from town.
Check road.is and vedur.is every morning before driving. A road clear at nine can be closed by eleven.
Take the sand and ash insurance on a hire car. The FCDO records British tourists paying large sums for wind damage that standard cover excludes.
Stay on the boardwalks at Hverir and Myvatn. The ground there is a thin crust over water at boiling point.
Solo women safety assessment: Iceland is consistently ranked the safest country in the world and Akureyri is a town of twenty thousand within it, so personal safety is genuinely not the question on this page. The FCDO publishes no advised-against areas anywhere in Iceland, no regional risks page, and says on terrorism only that ALTHOUGH THERE IS NO RECENT HISTORY OF TERRORISM IN ICELAND, ATTACKS CANNOT BE RULED OUT. On crime it says levels are LOW, and the single location it names in the whole country is AROUND BARS IN DOWNTOWN REYKJAVIK, four hundred kilometres south; saying that the warning does not reach here matters as much as repeating it would. English is universal and a woman travelling alone is unremarkable. WHAT THE ADVISORY IS ACTUALLY ABOUT IS THE LANDSCAPE, and one sentence deserves reading twice because all three things it names are things people come to look at: GOING TOO CLOSE TO THE OCEAN, CLIFF EDGES AND HOT SPRINGS ARE COMMON CAUSES OF ACCIDENTS IN ICELAND. In the north the hot springs clause is the live one, because the Myvatn geothermal fields are boiling mud and fumaroles with a thin crust in places and the only protection is staying on the marked paths. The second is the car: the FCDO states plainly that WEATHER DAMAGE TO RENTAL CARS IS NOT COVERED BY INSURANCE and that British tourists have paid large amounts for sand and ash stripping paintwork, so take the separate protection; it also requires DIPPED HEADLIGHTS YEAR ROUND, notes a lower drink-drive limit than the UK, warns that some main routes are gravel and some bridges single lane, and instructs five to ten kilometres an hour at river crossings where levels change within the same day. The third is darkness and weather: four or five hours of usable light in December, and conditions that change within the hour, which is why Iceland runs SAFE TRAVEL ICELAND for lodging a plan and why road.is and vedur.is should be checked before every driving day. The FCDO also notes that search and rescue MAY BE LIMITED IN SOME AREAS. Download the 112 app.
Reading On
Akureyri is the base for northern Iceland and this library's Icelandic coverage is growing around it. The Reykjavik packing list covers the capital, where almost everyone arrives and where the FCDO's one named crime location actually is. The Dettifoss packing list covers the most powerful waterfall in Europe two hours east of here, and the Gullfoss packing list and the Hofn packing list cover the Golden Circle and the south east. For the country as a whole the Iceland travel guide for women and the Iceland packing list carry the ring road, the driving rules and the practical material in full. For why wool is not a preference but the system Icelanders have used for a thousand years, read the guide to merino wool base layers for women. Every destination we cover is indexed at the travel packing guide for women, and the base layers are at the Roman Trail collection.
If the outer journey is calling you, the inner one usually is too. Explore SoulMap at romantrail.com/blogs/soulmap.
