Climb the crumbled lip of Valahnúkur (63.8128, -22.7155) at the southwestern tip of the Reykjanes Peninsula and look down into the salt grass at the foot of the cliff. Half-buried above the rolling sea boulders of Valahnúkamöl (63.8123, -22.7136) lie the dressed basalt blocks of Iceland's first lighthouse: lit on this headland in December 1878, crippled nine years later when an earthquake hurled every lamp and mirror onto its floor, and blown off the precipice with dynamite in April 1908 before the ocean could take it for free (Ferlir: skilti II; Vegagerðin).

Everything human on Reykjanestá has had to negotiate with that same geometry. Directly inland on the palagonite hill of Bæjarfell (63.8157, -22.7042), the replacement 1908 tower of Reykjanesviti stands next to an old radio-beacon engine house (Radíóviti) whose interior wall is inscribed with more than 3,500 names of sailors and fishermen lost off Iceland in a single century. Eight nautical miles offshore, the sheer seventy-seven-meter stack of Eldey (63.7408, -22.9567), capped white not by snow, as first-time visitors on Route 425 (Nesvegur) often guess, but by sixteen thousand breeding pairs of Northern Gannets, marks the low basalt ledge where three rowboat fishermen strangled the last breeding pair of Great Auks on Earth for a merchant's cash commission.

In the spoken episode, we follow the sensory arc connecting the lighthouse, the boulder ridge of Valahnúkamöl, and the wave-carved surf cauldron of Brimketill (63.8181, -22.5925). Here on the page is the fuller human ledger behind those three stops: how a submarine volcanic eruption in 1830 set off the final European bidding war for the Great Auk, why nineteenth-century engineers lost their thirty-year wager against Valahnúkur's palagonite cliff, and how families kept the light burning between ghost-ship timber wrecks and winter breakers until 1999.

Quick Facts: Reykjanesviti, Valahnúkamöl & Brimketill (Reykjanestá)

Attribute	Verified Field Data
Canonical Names & Etymology	Reykjanesviti (/ˈreiːcanɛsˌvɪːtɪ/, "Smoky Point Lighthouse") \| Valahnúkamöl ("Falcon Peak Boulder Berm") \| Brimketill ("Surf Cauldron") / Oddnýjarlaug ("Oddný's Pool") (Visit Reykjanes).
Coordinates & Elevation	Reykjanesviti on Bæjarfell (Vatnsfell): 63.8157, -22.7042 (~69 m focal plane; 73 m in some directories) \| Valahnúkamöl & Great Auk Monument: 63.8123, -22.7136 \| Brimketill: 63.8181, -22.5925 \| Eldey Island: 63.7408, -22.9567 (77 m sheer cliff).
Tectonic & Geological Setting	Landfall of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (Reykjanes Ridge, ~2 cm/yr divergence); Valahnúkur exposes subglacial pillow lava (bólstraberg), pillow breccia (bólstrabrotaberg), and palagonite tuff (móbergstúff) bordered by 1210–1240 AD Reykjaneseldar basalt flows (Visit Reykjanes; OceanRep GEOMAR).
The Two Lighthouses	First Tower (lit Dec 1, 1878): 8.2 m high, 4.5 m diameter octagonal dressed-stone tower on Valahnúkur designed by Alexander Rothe; crippled by the Oct 28, 1887 earthquake and wave erosion, demolished with explosives on April 16, 1908 (Ferlir: skilti II; Vegagerðin). Current Tower (lit March 20, 1908): 26.7 m total structure (2.2 m base + 20 m shaft + 4.5 m lantern; listed as 31 m in some directories) with dressed stone outside and concrete inside, designed by Frederik Kiørboe and Thorvald Krabbe (Ferlir: skilti I; Vegagerðin).
The Great Auk Extinction	After an 1830 submarine eruption sank Geirfuglasker, the last confirmed breeding pair of Pinguinus impennis was killed on a low ledge at Eldey on June 3, 1844 by Jón Brandsson, Sigurður Ísleifsson, and Ketill Ketilsson; memorialized by Todd McGrain's bronze sculpture (Wikipedia: Great Auk; Visit Reykjanes).
Avian & Coastal Ecology	Eldey hosts ~16,000 breeding pairs of Northern Gannets (Morus bassanus) out of ~30,000 pairs in Iceland (~25,000 cited by tour operators; ~70,000 birds counted in 1949); nearby Hafnaberg (63.8756, -22.7314, 43 m high) hosts ~6,000 seabird pairs (Visit Reykjanes; Iceland Monitor).
Confirmed Screen Credits	Sigur Rós: "Glósóli" (2005, Valahnúkur cliff finale) and Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020, "Volcano Man" at Valahnúkamöl) (Go Campers; Amazing Iceland); while Black Mirror: "Crocodile" (2017) filmed on the Reykjanes Peninsula at Kleifarvatn and Grænavatn (Route 42), claims placing it on the Reykjanesviti coastal road are unconfirmed (Arctic Adventures).

How an Undersea Volcano and a Museum Receipt Killed the Last Great Auk

To understand why the last two Great Auks (Pinguinus impennis, or Geirfugl in Icelandic) died on Eldey in the early summer of 1844, you have to rewind fourteen years to a volcanic eruption that nobody on mainland Europe cared about.

For thousands of years, the Great Auk was the true penguin of the Northern Hemisphere: European sailors applied the word penguin to this eighty-centimeter, five-kilogram black-and-white bird long before anyone sailed into the Southern Ocean and named the unrelated birds of Antarctica after it. Clumsy on solid rock, flightless, and fearless in the water, the Great Auk had been slaughtered across the North Atlantic for salted bait, lamp oil, and feather mattresses until only one fortress remained beyond the reach of wooden rowboats: Geirfuglasker ("Great Auk Skerry"), a jagged volcanic rock surrounded by heavy surf in the Fuglasker archipelago southwest of Reykjanes (Visit Reykjanes; Historical Marker Database).

In March 1830, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge split beneath the water off Reykjanestá. A submarine volcanic eruption shattered Geirfuglasker and dropped the skerry beneath the waves. Suddenly homeless in the middle of the ocean, the surviving flightless birds swam toward the nearest high rock on the horizon: Eldey (63.7408, -22.9567). Eldey looked impenetrable from a distance, rising seventy-seven vertical meters out of the sea, but it had one fatal flaw: a sloping rock ledge at the water's edge where agile fishermen could leap ashore during a calm swell.

As soon as natural history dealers and museum curators in Copenhagen, London, and Berlin realized that Geirfuglasker had vanished and that the Great Auk was vanishing with it, they did not pass a conservation law. They raised the price on skins and eggs (Audubon). Between 1830 and 1841, raiding boats from the Reykjanes Peninsula harvested dozens of birds off Eldey's lower ledge to fill glass display cabinets abroad. By the spring of 1844, Reykjavík merchant Carl Siemsen offered a cash commission to boat captain Vilhjálmur Hákonarson to bring back whatever Great Auks remained on the rock.

After rowing out overnight from the peninsula during their June 2–5 voyage, Vilhjálmur's fourteen-man crew reached Eldey on the morning of June 3, 1844 (a date printed as July 3 in several later summaries and in the spoken episode; see the Field Notes). Three men jumped from the boat onto the wet basalt shelf: Jón Brandsson, Sigurður Ísleifsson, and Ketill Ketilsson (Wikipedia: Great Auk; Thomas et al. 2017). Scrambling up under a cloud of screaming seabirds, they spotted two large black-and-white birds running desperately across the rock with their stubby wings outstretched. Jón Brandsson cornered one bird in a crevice and strangled it; Sigurður Ísleifsson caught and strangled its mate near the edge of the shelf. As for the single streaked egg the pair had been incubating on the bare lava slab, historical accounts divide on the final gesture: in John Wolley and Alfred Newton's 1858 interviews with the crew (Bengtson 1984), Ketill Ketilsson picked up the egg and, seeing that its shell had already cracked in the scramble, set it back down on the stone, whereas later popular retellings describe him crushing it under his boot. Either way, the lineage ended on that wet ledge, and the crew rowed back to shore to sell the last breeding pair of Great Auks on Earth so their internal organs could sit in preservative jars in Copenhagen.

Thirty Years on a Crumbling Ledge: Why Iceland Blew Up Its First Lighthouse

Thirty-four years after that boat returned from Eldey, engineers made a bold bet against the same stretch of ocean. On December 1, 1878, crews lit the oil lamp inside Iceland's very first lighthouse on the summit of Valahnúkur (63.8128, -22.7155), the coastal headland jutting directly above the surf (Vegagerðin; Ferlir: skilti II).

Designed and supervised on site by engineer Alexander Rothe, the 1878 tower was an octagonal structure measuring 8.2 meters high and 4.5 meters across, built with meter-thick walls of dressed Icelandic basalt, a copper-domed lantern, and a heavy wire-mesh cage around the glass so migrating seabirds would not smash the panes in the dark. Below the lantern sat cramped quarters for two watchkeepers who tended the flame from August 1 to May 15 on sixteen barrels of oil a year. On paper, Valahnúkur was the ideal spot to guide ships rounding Reykjanes into Faxaflói Bay. What the blueprints underestimated was the sandwich of rock holding the tower up.

Valahnúkur was born in a single subglacial eruption that left three distinct textures in the cliff: subaqueous pillow lava (bólstraberg), sloping pillow breccia (bólstrabrotaberg), and thick layers of yellowish-brown palagonite tuff (móbergstúff) formed when 1,200°C magma shattered into glassy ash in cold water (Visit Reykjanes). Palagonite tuff is soft and porous. Every winter storm rolling across the North Atlantic undercut the headland, while tectonic swarms along the Reykjanes Ridge shook it from underneath.

On October 28, 1887, a violent earthquake struck the tip of the peninsula (Ferlir: skilti II; Ferlir: Reykjanesviti og nágrenni). Huge masses of rock collapsed off Valahnúkur into the sea, three deep fissures split the cliff near the foundation, the keeper's house was damaged, and inside the lighthouse every single lamp and mirror was hurled to the floor (allir lampar og speglar í vitanum fóru í gólfið). The keepers could not relight the beacon the next night. Over the following eighteen years, surf and tremors chewed the headland backward until, by 1905, only ten meters of cracked rock separated the lighthouse wall from a sheer drop into the breakers, and the keeper was afraid to stand watch inside it.

Moving quickly with funds voted by Alþingi, the first major public construction project undertaken after Iceland gained Home Rule in 1904, architect Frederik Kiørboe and engineer Thorvald Krabbe retreated inland onto the hill of Bæjarfell (also recorded locally as Vatnsfell, 63.8157, -22.7042) (Vegagerðin; Ferlir: skilti I). Completed on December 23, 1907 (Þorláksmessa), the new cylindrical Reykjanesviti rose 26.7 meters from base to lantern top, built with double walls, dressed stone on the outside and cast concrete on the inside, over three meters thick at the base, to withstand hurricane gusts. On March 20, 1908, its weight-driven 500-millimeter rotating lens flashed across the water for the first time; four weeks later, on April 16, 1908, crews packed the cracked 1878 tower on Valahnúkur with explosives and blew Iceland's first lighthouse into rubble, where its dressed stones still lie scattered at the base of the cliff.

Pitch-Pine from a Ghost Ship and 3,500 Names in the Engine House

Walk around the base of Bæjarfell today and you can still trace how families survived on this exposed cape from 1878 until the last resident lighthouse keeper left in 1999 (Ferlir: skilti I; Ferlir: Reykjanesviti og nágrenni).

Out on the lava flat southwest of the hill sit the stacked stone walls (hlaðnir garðar), the paved path toward Valahnúkur, the ruins of the original 1879 keeper's farmstead, and a walk-in stone water well (brunnur) where keepers walked down steps into the rock to haul fresh water while farming sheep beside the steam vents of Gunnuhver. Before gas equipment arrived in 1929 and electricity in 1957, keeping ships alive meant climbing the concrete cylinder at regular intervals through winter gales to wind the heavy clockwork weights that turned the lens: a post passed down in the 1930s and 1940s from keeper Jón Ágúst Guðmundsson to his widow Kristín Guðmundsdóttir and then to their son Einir Jónsson (Icelandic Wikipedia).

To the folks living along this treeless coast, the sea was both executioner and supplier. In 1881, just three years after the first lamp was lit on Valahnúkur, the American merchant sailing ship Jamestown drifted ashore crewless near Hafnir a few kilometers north of the cape, her hold packed with prime building timber (Iceland Review; NatureTime). Salvaged and auctioned across the peninsula, Jamestown planks raised the walls of nearby Hvalsneskirkja and laid solid wooden floors and beams inside historic houses across Suðurnes and Reykjavík (Reykjavik Historic Home).

Yet the reefs directly beneath Reykjanesviti took far more than they gave. On February 28, 1950, the ten-thousand-ton British oil tanker Clam grounded at Kirkjuvogsbás just east of the lighthouse cliffs with fifty-four men aboard; half the crew, twenty-seven British and Chinese sailors, drowned in the surf before the other twenty-seven could be pulled to safety (Ferlir: Reykjanesviti og nágrenni). If you step inside the old radio-beacon engine house (Radíóviti, used from 1936 to 1992) beside the lighthouse today, you meet the true ledger of this coastline: an entire wall covered with the names of more than 3,500 people who perished at sea off Iceland during the twentieth century (Vegagerðin).

Oddný's Freezing Bathtub, the Volcano Man Keyboard, and the Quiet Walk to Hafnaberg

Six and a half kilometers east along Route 425, the collision between young lava and ocean swell narrows into a black coastal basin called Brimketill (63.8181, -22.5925), or Oddnýjarlaug ("Oddný's Pool") (Visit Reykjanes).

According to local folklore, the night-troll Oddný lived just west of the basin in the nine-thousand-year-old picrite shield of Háleyjabunga with her husband Hróar and their son Sölvi (Visit Reykjanes; Amazing Iceland). One night she strode east to the skerry of Ræningjasker to retrieve a stranded whale carcass, stopping at Brimketill on her way home to rest and bathe in the basin where she also washed her clothes (Visit Reykjanes: Cultural Heritage). She lingered too long in the surf; as she climbed out toward home, the first rays of morning sun struck her and turned her into a tall stone stack that stood by the shore until the Atlantic waves gradually battered it down. Calling Brimketill a "bathing pool" (laug) was the peninsula's oldest way of reminding strangers that only a troll made of basalt could climb into that hollow and walk out alive.

In physical reality, Brimketill was carved into the rough 1210–1240 AD lava edge of Staðarberg by pneumatic and mechanical violence (Visit Reykjanes). Every breaking wave compresses air tightly inside cracks and fissures in the basalt; as the backwash sucks out (útsog), it creates a sudden low-pressure vacuum (undirþrýstingur) that fractures the stone, aided by loose boulders and rock fragments hurled by the surf and by winter frost wedging. On a sunny afternoon at low tide, the trapped seawater looks deceptively like a calm coastal hot tub. Step off the viewing platform onto the lower rock rim, however, and your boots meet black marine algae as slippery as wet ice. Unpredictable sneaker waves regularly explode over the rim, soaking the viewing platform and nearly reaching the parking lot, while the backwash sucks out everything inside the basin into extreme coastal currents (Visit Reykjanes: Brimketill). Stay behind the railing, hold your car door with two hands in the wind, and never wipe the salt-and-volcanic-grit film off your camera lens with a dry shirt sleeve unless you want to sand your own glass.

If you want to experience this coast away from tour buses and movie stops, though the weathered, unpowered keyboard photographed in the salt grass at Valahnúkamöl (63.8125, -22.7160) as an informal tribute after Netflix's 2020 comedy Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is a delightfully absurd footnote against black basalt, even if its provenance, screen-prop status, and survival through each winter's surf remain unconfirmed (Visit Reykjanes), drive north on Route 425 and walk the flat four-kilometer trail across the gray Racomitrium moss to Hafnaberg (63.8756, -22.7314). There are no viewing platforms on the forty-three-meter lava cliffs of Hafnaberg, only six thousand breeding pairs of guillemots, kittiwakes, fulmars, and razorbills, the closest living cousins of the Great Auk, banking on the updrafts at eye level.

Walk back across the lava field toward the cape at dusk and you see how all four layers of Reykjanestá fit together in a single frame. Down in the dip below Bæjarfell, the stone steps of the 1879 walk-in well (brunnur) and the dynamited basalt blocks of Alexander Rothe's 1878 tower sit in the lee of the storm ridge, while Todd McGrain's bronze Great Auk (63.8125, -22.7142) faces out across eight nautical miles of gray swell toward the gannet-whitened table of Eldey (63.7408, -22.9567). Up on the hill behind you, the 1908 concrete-and-stone cylinder sends its double white flash out over the reefs every thirty seconds, lighting the same cold water recorded on the wall of 3,500 names inside the engine house next door.

A STORY. NOT A GUIDE.
ICELAND. TOLD.

Frequently Asked Questions: Reykjanesviti, Valahnúkamöl & Brimketill

Why was the original 1878 Reykjanesviti lighthouse demolished?

Iceland's first lighthouse, lit on December 1, 1878 atop the sea cliff of Valahnúkur (63.8128, -22.7155), was built on fractured palagonite tuff (móbergstúff) and pillow breccia. On October 28, 1887, a violent earthquake opened three chasms in the cliff and threw all the lighthouse's lamps and mirrors onto the floor, and by 1905 wave erosion had left only 10 meters between the tower and the precipice. Architect Frederik Kiørboe and engineer Thorvald Krabbe built the current 26.7-meter dressed-stone-and-concrete tower inland on Bæjarfell (Vatnsfell) (63.8157, -22.7042) in 1907–1908, and the old 1878 tower was demolished with explosives on April 16, 1908 (Ferlir, skilti I; Ferlir, skilti II; Vegagerðin).

Is Brimketill a warm geothermal pool that you can swim in?

No. Despite its folkloric nickname Oddnýjarlaug ("Oddný's Pool", named after a night-roaming giantess), Brimketill (63.8181, -22.5925) is a cold North Atlantic marine basin carved into rough coastal basalt by compressed air in rock fissures, low-pressure backwash suction, and wave-hurled stones. Unpredictable waves that nearly reach the parking lot, slick black algae on the rock rim, and powerful currents make entering the water life-threatening (Visit Reykjanes: Náttúra; Visit Reykjanes: Brimketill).

What is the white cap on Eldey Island visible from Valahnúkamöl?

The bright white surface atop the 77-meter sheer rock of Eldey (63.7408, -22.9567), 8 nautical miles southwest of Valahnúkamöl, is not snow: it is one of the world's largest colonies of Northern Gannets (Morus bassanus, with ~16,000 breeding pairs reported by regional authorities, ~25,000 cited by tour operators, and ~70,000 birds counted in 1949) covering the flat 0.03 km² summit plateau directly above the low coastal ledge where the last confirmed pair of flightless Great Auks (Pinguinus impennis) was killed on June 3, 1844 (Visit Reykjanes: Náttúra; Eldey.is; Wikipedia: Great Auk).