Iceland's lobster capital — the hummar fishing village at Vatnajökull's edge, Diamond Beach's icebergs on black sand
Höfn (pronounced 'hup' — Icelandic for 'harbour') is a fishing town of 2,100 people on the Hornafjörður lagoon in southeastern Iceland, at the southeastern edge of Vatnajökull (the largest glacier in Europe at 7,900 km², covering 8% of Iceland's surface). The town sits where the glacier's outlet tongues meet the North Atlantic coast — the combination of glacial tongues flowing from black mountains, grey Atlantic light, and the flat fjord creates a landscape of extraordinary scale. Höfn's famous product is the hummar (Icelandic langoustine — Nephrops norvegicus — smaller and sweeter than Atlan…
Höfn has been a fishing settlement since the 9th-century Norse settlement of Iceland but its current identity dates from the 20th-century fishing cooperative economy. The Ring Road (Route 1) was not completed through this section until 1974 when the Skeiðará bridge was built across the glacial outwash plain — before that, southeastern Iceland was only accessible by boat or across the Vatnajökull glacier itself. The recent receding of Breiðamerkurjökull has deepened the Jökulsárlón lagoon significantly since the 1970s as melt accelerates.