UNDERTOURISM

Once overrun with visitors, Iceland is faced with the opposite problem in the pandemic – so now is the time to relish its open spaces, says Paul Sullivan

It’s just a few hours since I was given the all-clear from a not-too-comfortable but blissfully quick Covid test at Iceland’s Keflavik airport, and I’m neck-deep in the milkyblue, geothermally heated waters of the famous Blue Lagoon. In normal times, the lagoon pulls in around a million visitors a year, but today just a couple of hundred people are wading around with the venue’s trademark white silica smeared on their faces. And almost all the voices I hear are Icelandic.

“When we travelled around Iceland three summers ago to show our youngest daughter some of the sights along the southern coast, it was a nightmare,” says a lady I start chatting to at the lagoon’s juice bar. “There were so many tourists, lots of elbowing… and we just gave up. It’s not that we don’t like or want visitors, but there really have been a lot during the last few years, and it’s honestly just nice to have our country back for a little while.”

Her comments are echoed by many during my week-long drive through Iceland, as locals take the opportunity to explore their own country before the hordes descend again. And who can blame them? Tourism has escalated