Iceland's most northerly town and former herring capital — the Herring Era Museum, a ski resort carved into the Arctic hillside, and one genuinely unspoiled fjord
Siglufjörður is the northernmost town in Iceland (66°N, just barely north of the Arctic Circle) — a former herring fishing capital that boomed spectacularly in the first half of the 20th century and contracted just as fast when the herring collapsed in the 1960s. The town sits at the very head of the Siglufjörður fjord — a narrow fjord enclosed on three sides by mountains reaching 1,000m, connected to the north coast of Iceland by the Héðinsfjörður tunnel (opened 2010; before that the road was seasonally impassable and the town was isolated for weeks at a time in winter). The Herring Era Muse…
Siglufjörður's herring boom (1903–1968) was one of the most intense economic events in Icelandic history — at its peak in the 1940s, the town had a population of 3,000 (the same as today) plus several thousand seasonal Norwegian herring girl workers who came each summer to salt and barrel the herring on the salting stations (saltfiskhús) along the waterfront. The town built a hospital, a cinema, a swimming pool, and multiple fish processing factories; the Grand Hotel hosted international fishing captains and merchants. When the North Atlantic herring stock collapsed in 1968–1969, the town emp…