The whale-watching capital of Europe — humpbacks breach in Skjálfandi Bay, the Whale Museum, and Iceland's freshest Arctic char from the fjord fish market
Húsavík is a small fishing town on the northern coast of Iceland — 90km east of Akureyri, on the western shore of Skjálfandi Bay, the deepest bay on Iceland's north coast and one of the world's finest whale-watching locations. The town claims to be the site of the first Scandinavian settlement in Iceland: the Norse explorer Garðar Svavarsson wintered here around 870 CE, before Ingólfur Arnarson's official first permanent settlement (874 CE). The whale watching: from May to September, Skjálfandi Bay hosts large populations of humpback whales, minke whales, harbour porpoises, and white-beaked d…
Húsavík was Iceland's first settled location (winter camp of Garðar Svavarsson, c. 870 CE); the town's fishing harbour was established in the medieval period and remained primarily a fishing settlement through the centuries. The Tjörnes peninsula north of Húsavík is Iceland's most important palaeontological site — the Tjörnes fossil beds contain marine Pliocene and Miocene-era fossils showing 15 million years of ocean climate change; the fossils include clams and snails that now live only in the Pacific Ocean, evidence that the North Atlantic was connected to the Pacific before the closure of…