In Iceland, the good life is a trip to the pool ... geothermal pool
STEPPING into the waist-deep waters of Sky Lagoon, I saw blurry shapes through swirling steam. Pink-cheeked women waded past holding phones and pint glasses aloft as I entered the geothermal spa that opened in June outside of Reykjavik, Iceland.
Still dazed from an overnight flight, I had come to the spa with my always-intrepid mom, my travel companion for a twoweek road trip by camper van. A profusion of hot water and white towels is my panacea anywhere on earth - I’m just as happy in a Budapest bathhouse as a Moroccan hammam - but this version was unmistakably Icelandic.
Dim, cavelike changing rooms led to pools flanked by lava rock walls, mirroring the volcano blasted landscape surrounding the capital. Bathers at the edge of the water watched smoke drifting from the Geldingadalir eruption, which had been fuming and flowing for months. Slabs of grassy turf roofed low-slung spa buildings.
“It’s an ode to Icelandic bathing culture,” said Dagny Petursdottir, general manager at Sky Lagoon, explaining that public bathing is at the heart of the country’s social life. Spas like Sky Lagoon are popular with groups of coworkers, a bartender told me later that day; it’s team-building in bathing suits. Even the tiniest towns have their own public pools in this windblown, almostArctic island country, haunts for everyone from school kids to retirees. Deep in the countryside, roadside signs point to natural hot springs burbling straight from the earth.
Blissed out after the soak and eyeing cool weather in the forecast, we decided to seek out every spa, pool and spring we could find.
And we did: One cloudy evening at Myvatn Nature Baths, a lakeside spa along the popular Golden Circle driving route, we watched young mothers sip beer from plastic cups as their kids played nearby. Every few minutes, a bather walked into the chilly lake, then scurried, shivering, back toward the hot pools. Beside me, an elderly couple held hands underneath the water.
“Pools are the most interesting public sphere in the country,” said Valdimar Hafstein, a professor of folklore and ethnology at the University of Iceland who studies Icelandic bathing culture. Icelanders tend to be reticent among those they don’t know, Hafstein said. “Except when you’re sitting in the hot tub at your local pool - then you will talk to anyone and everyone. It’s where strangers meet.”
At Myvatn, I made my move. “Do you come here often?” I asked the couple beside me. “In the summer, we like to visit the spa and sit out in the sunshine,” said the woman, her scalp rosy beneath thinning hair. “But usually we just go to our local pool.”
If nearly everyone in Iceland has a local pool, said Hafstein, who is developing an exhibition on Icelandic swimming pools for the Museum of Design and Applied Art outside of Reykjavik, it’s because of a century-old, desperate bid to save Icelandic lives amid a sudden crisis.
At one time, Icelandic people - then ruled by Denmark - were required by law to live on farms. That created a perpetual underclass of agricultural laborers with limited seafaring experience, Hafstein said. When the rules changed in the late 19th century, some workers left for the seacoast to make their livings in open fishing boats.
Most of them didn’t know how to swim, Hafstein said. “People were just drowning by the scores. It’s in my own family history as well. My great-grandfather drowned along with three of his sons, in plain view of his wife and younger children. Not 50 feet from shore, but nobody could swim.” Icelandic authorities decided that every child in the island country should learn. By the 1920s and 1930s, swimming was a mandatory part of school, and local swimming societies and municipalities were building pools across the country.
On a howling, windy day in Stykkisholmur, a harbor town on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, we took shelter at the public pool while watching swim-capped kids racing up and down the narrow lanes. Swim lessons are still mandatory, and days at the pool are an integral part of life for many.
“I was brought up in the swimming pool, that was my playground,” said Jon Karl Helgason, a filmmaker whose documentary “Sundlaugar a Islandi,” which translates to “swimming pools in Iceland,” premieres in the country this winter. “Since then, I’ve been visiting the swimming pool every day for almost 60 years.”
Helgason went to some 100 pools while filming the documentary. Like the one we visited at Stykkisholmur, most are warmed by hot water drawn from beneath the earth. Iceland is one of the world’s most volcanically active countries, and although eruptions are an occasional hazard, geothermal power keeps the lights on, houses cozy and pools warm.
That abundant hot water is a major tourist draw, too. Among the country’s most prominent sites is Blue Lagoon, a man-made, geothermally heated spa where natural algae tint water the hue of a blue-raspberry Popsicle. On the day we visited, steam from the pools smudged into the cloudy sky above, creating an otherworldly dome of white haze. Visitors queued for gobs of mineral mud to daub on faces and arms.
I asked for directions to the bar from a passing group of women carrying plastic glasses of wine. They pointed the way in a bracing chorus of Long Island vowels. Joyous and a little drunk, they were friends vacationing together for the first time since the pandemic. Gulping from a spout piping cool water from the wall, one in the group hollered: “It’s melted glaciers, girls!”
More tranquil are the rustic, natural hot springs dotted across the country. The water is hottest in central Iceland, a geologically youthful area where scalding water erupts from the earth at regular intervals. The Westfjords region, at Iceland’s northwestern corner, is geologically older, farther from that fresh magma. There, I found rustic hot tubs at Goldilocks-perfect temperatures.
Near my riverside camp spot in Heydalur, a Westfjords farm with a campground, cabins, riding stables and restaurant, water gushed from below ground into steaming tubs just outside a greenhouse. Inside, fruit trees overhung a small, warm pool; saddles and bridles stored nearby gave the humid room a pleasantly horsy smell.
In the 12th century, Bishop Gudmundur Arason had blessed these hot springs, said Stella Gudmundsdottir, Heydalur’s tiny, white-haired matriarch. “He was blessing everything, really - cliffs, ponds, whatever,” Gudmundsdottir said. “But he blessed the hot pool, too, so people believed it was holy.”
After dinner and a swim in the greenhouse, I walked across a shallow river and flower-filled meadow to a simple hot spring ringed by stones. Blossoms bobbled on thin stalks at the edge of the possibly holy pool. I floated with eyes closed against the midnight sun.
Most Westfjords springs, of course, don’t benefit from official blessings. But they’re a refuge for travelers in a country where wild, unpredictable weather is all part of the charm.
In Reykjafjardarlaug Hot Pool, near the village of Bildudalur, we lay warm beneath the surface as a gale whipped the nearby fjord into froth. Following an evening squall, we watched the sun emerge from a pool high above the sea at Talknafjordur. Once, we picked up a damp Czech hitchhiker who had reached the road after three days of walking among peaks. Peering through the rainy windshield, he said: “Now it’s time to go to the pool.”
And another day, on the Westfjords’ southern coast, we donned clammy bathing suits in the van, then raced through cold air to Hellulaug, a beachside thermal pool contained by a pile of mossy rocks. We joined a handful of cheery Bavarian tourists marinating in the warm water.
On vacation after an agonizing winter, the group was exploring Iceland in camper vans, stopping to linger in hot springs as often as they could. They were leaving soon. In a few days, they said, they’d return to the German hospitals and clinics where they work.
We chatted and slid deeper into the tub from stone perches. “What will we do without hot pools when we get home?” someone asked aloud, speaking for us all.