THE STORY
Contents
- Suðurnesjabær, Iceland: Cold War Plexiglass, the Lighthouse Built Under the Fog, and the Poet’s Daughter Under the Walkway
- Why a Salt-Blasted Promontory Is Called "The Garden", and How Sixty Engines Replaced the Oar
- Two Lighthouses, a Silent Concrete Box, and the Ghost Called Karlinn
- The Stuffed Walrus of Sandgerði, the Wreck of the Pourquoi-Pas?, and the Gravestone Under the Path
- Blood-Drawing Terns and the Sneaker Waves on the Olivine Shelf
- Quick Facts: Suðurnesjabær (Garður, Sandgerði, Garðskagi & Hvalsnes)
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- Related Iceland Explained Episodes
Suðurnesjabær, Iceland: Cold War Plexiglass, the Lighthouse Built Under the Fog, and the Poet’s Daughter Under the Walkway
Kick the yellow gravel on a scraped, rectangular concrete pad high on the heath of Miðnesheiði, ten minutes north of Keflavík International Airport, and you are standing on the archaeology of the Cold War. Picture the station between the coastal towns of Sandgerði and Garður in operation: a clear plexiglass plotting board covered with backward numbers in red grease pencil. The unit arrived in Iceland in 1952; this permanent station began operating in October 1953, closed in 1997, and was later bulldozed in 2004. This was Rockville Air Station: an American radar outpost nicknamed "Little America," built to watch the sky for Soviet bombers crossing the Greenland–Iceland–United Kingdom gap. Inside a windowless operations blockhouse, young technicians stood in the dark behind giant transparent map boards and wrote incoming radar tracks in mirror-script so commanders seated out front could read the sky in real time, while outside in the January gale, airmen poured water onto snowbanks piled against their corrugated metal Quonset huts, using solid blocks of ice to plug the drafts underneath the unsealed concrete floors.
On modern municipal maps, this northernmost hook of the Reykjanes Peninsula, known in medieval chronicles as Rosmhvalanes, the Walrus Peninsula, carries the tidy administrative label of Suðurnesjabær, created in 2018 by merging the longtime fishing rivals of Sandgerði and Garður. Most travelers landing at Keflavík turn their rental cars south toward the Blue Lagoon or east toward Reykjavík without ever looking north toward the tip of the boot. When foreign film crews do drive out here, as Ben Stiller did when he filmed the harbor and offshore waters of Garður and Sandgerði as "Nuuk, Greenland" in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, they come to borrow the look of quiet subarctic isolation. Spend an afternoon walking the basalt reefs, engine sheds, and driftwood church aisles that the spoken episode had to compress, and you discover a coastline built entirely around the problem of seeing through the dark.
Why a Salt-Blasted Promontory Is Called "The Garden": and How Sixty Engines Replaced the Oar
Drive out to the northern tip of the peninsula at Garðskagi, where the grey olivine tholeiite basalt (grágrýti) kicks out into the tidal churn of Faxaflói Bay, and the first puzzle is the town's name. In modern Icelandic, Garður means "garden." Standing on a treeless, wind-flayed spit where aerosolized salt spray (selta) crusts your eyelashes in five minutes and whitens the stone walls, calling this place a garden sounds like dry Nordic sarcasm.
Walk two kilometers south toward the timber church of Útskálar, however, and you meet the actual namesake rising five feet out of the turf: Skagagarður. In Old Norse, a garðr was not a flowerbed; it was a defensive barrier wall. During the settlement and Commonwealth eras, residents stacked turf and black lava blocks into a massive, 1,500-meter-long earthen rampart stretching clear across the neck of the headland between Útskálar and Kirkjuból. That wall served two survival functions at once: it kept wandering sheep and cattle out of the precious hayfields (tún) that kept livestock alive through winter, and its leeward face trapped a narrow pocket of still air where grass could grow out of reach of the salt gale. Civilization on this point began by building a wall against the horizon.
What drew hundreds of seasonal workers to live behind that wall was not the thin soil, but the winter cod banks just offshore. Step inside the Garður Folk and Maritime Museum (Byggðasafn Garðskaga) beside the point, and the entire economic pivot of rural Iceland sits under one roof. At one end rests the clinker-built, six-oared rowboat Fram, constructed in 1887 in the traditional Engeyjarlag style: an open wooden shell propelled purely by human muscle and calories into four-degree water.
Beside Fram sits the lifework of local mechanic Guðni Ingimundarson: more than sixty restored, operational marine engines spanning the early twentieth century. Here are the single-cylinder Möllerup "hot-bulb" surface-ignition engines that transformed Icelandic fishing villages forever. Before a crew could cast off, the engineer had to heat the cast-iron cylinder head with an open blowtorch until the metal glowed dull red, then heave the flywheel over until the harbor echoed with the slow, heavy thump-thump of igniting fuel oil. That mechanical pulse allowed boats to punch against headwinds that trapped six-oared rowboats on the beach, turning seasonal fishing shacks (verbúðir) into permanent towns. Every June under the Midnight Sun, during the town's Sólseturshátíð (Sunset Festival), volunteers drag those antique engines out onto the grass at Garðskagi and fire them up alongside live bands, drowning out the North Atlantic surf for a few defiant hours with blowtorches, diesel smoke, and unmuffled exhaust.
Two Lighthouses, a Silent Concrete Box, and the Ghost Called Karlinn
Nowhere is the peninsula's war with visibility clearer than in the two towers standing a few hundred meters apart at the tip of Garðskagi.
The first tower, built in 1897 right on the tidal rock shelf, is the second-oldest concrete structure in Iceland. To a casual eye, the Old Garðskagi Lighthouse looks strangely stunted: a squat, square concrete box rising barely 11.4 meters above the boulders. That low profile was a deliberate piece of optical engineering. Warm Atlantic air meeting cold coastal water frequently wraps the tip of Reykjanes in a dense bank of sea fog that hovers fifteen to thirty meters above the tide line. Had nineteenth-century engineers built a tall tower, its lantern beam would have shone straight into the cloud deck, reflecting back off the water droplets in a blinding white wall of backscatter. By keeping the tower squat and low to the ground, the light shone horizontally underneath the fog ceiling, illuminating the breaking reef for open boats fighting their way toward shore.
Solving that optical problem created an accidental acoustic marvel. To survive the battering of multi-ton Atlantic storm swells, the 1897 tower was cast with thick, monolithic concrete walls. Step through the low doorway today and pull the heavy door shut behind you: the concussive roar of the surf outside drops away into an eerie, resonant chamber silence. Garður also became the setting for the haunting live performance of "Particles," a collaboration between Ólafur Arnalds and local singer Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir, co-lead vocalist of Of Monsters and Men, for Arnalds' Island Songs project, filmed at the lighthouses.
Outside on the reef, the ocean kept chewing at the basalt cooling joints underneath the old tower's foundation. By 1944, the year Iceland declared its modern republic, the sea had encroached so close to the 1897 walls that state engineer Axel Sveinsson erected the New Garðskagi Lighthouse further back on the turf: a slender, twenty-eight-meter cylindrical column that remains the tallest lighthouse in Iceland, sweeping Faxaflói with a white flash every five seconds (Fl W 5s) across fifteen nautical miles. Climb to the 360-degree gallery of the 1944 tower when a gale hits the peninsula, and you feel the concrete cylinder hum underfoot while the wind shears past the railing at a high scream, making it easy to understand why local folklore insists the stairs and lantern room are still paced by Karlinn ("The Old Man"), the ghost of an early keeper said to have been driven mad by the unceasing roar of the shoals.
The Stuffed Walrus of Sandgerði, the Wreck of the Pourquoi-Pas?, and the Gravestone Under the Path
Follow the coast road five kilometers southwest from Garðskagi into Sandgerði, and the atmosphere shifts from lighthouse watchkeeping to working trawler port. Here the air is thick with the iodine tang of piled Laminaria kelp rotting on black boulder beaches, the metallic bite of marine diesel, and the periodic high-decibel whine of wide-body passenger jets dropping down the glide slope into Keflavík.
Right above the harbor sits the Suðurnes Science and Learning Center (Þekkingarsetur Suðurnesja): a quiet scientific counterweight to the fish-processing plants next door. While deckhands outside unload cod and haddock in the sleet, biologists inside preserve thousands of deep-sea benthic invertebrates dredged from the volcanic vents and trenches of the Reykjanes Ridge. Standing guard in the exhibition hall is the only taxidermied walrus (rostungur) in Iceland, a massive, tusked reminder of the prehistoric and settlement-age walrus herds whose ivory drew the first Viking hunters to Rosmhvalanes over a thousand years ago.
Alongside the walrus sits the archive of one of the twentieth century's worst scientific maritime disasters. Before dawn on September 16, 1936, the celebrated French polar exploration barque Pourquoi-Pas?, commanded by sixty-nine-year-old physician and explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot and outfitted with three laboratories and a library of polar science, was caught in a violent cyclonic storm after departing Reykjavík. Blinded in the darkness and hurricane-force surf of Faxaflói Bay, the ship was driven onto the jagged submerged reefs off Álftanes á Mýrum across the bay. When the hull shattered in the freezing breakers, thirty-nine men, including Charcot, were ground into the surf; only a single crewman, master helmsman Eugène Gonidec, survived to wash ashore and tell what had happened when visibility dropped to zero.
Drive seven kilometers south of Sandgerði past the old salt-fish drying walls to the lonely coastal parish of Hvalsnes, and the sea's habit of taking and returning things reaches its quietest monument. Consecrated in 1887, Hvalsneskirkja is built of dark, dressed basalt blocks quarried from the surrounding lava, while its interior woodwork and pews were carpentered from Siberian driftwood and prime timber salvaged from the giant American three-masted clipper ship Jamestown, which drifted ashore without a living soul aboard near Hafnir in 1881.
Two centuries before that stone church went up, between 1644 and 1651, the impoverished turf parish of Hvalsnes was served by Hallgrímur Pétursson: the pastor who would go on to write the Passíusálmar (Hymns of the Passion), the foundational masterpiece of Icelandic religious poetry. While living in extreme poverty on this rocky shore in 1649, Hallgrímur lost his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Steinunn Hallgrímsdóttir. Too poor to buy an imported monument, the grieving father picked up a chisel, selected a flat slab of grey Reykjanes basalt, and carved her name, year, and a verse into the rough stone with his own hands.
When the old turf churches at Hvalsnes were torn down and rebuilt over subsequent generations, Steinunn's gravestone vanished. For more than two hundred years, nobody knew where the child's marker had gone, until 1964, when workmen repairing the flagged stone walkway leading up to the church door pried up a worn basalt paving slab to level the path. Turned face-down in the mud, where generations of wet boots had stepped across the stone on their way to Sunday service without knowing it, were the letters Hallgrímur Pétursson had chiselled for his daughter in 1649.
Blood-Drawing Terns and the Sneaker Waves on the Olivine Shelf
Today, Steinunn's stone rests safely inside the nave of Hvalsneskirkja, out of reach of the salt wind. Outside along the coast between Hvalsnes, Sandgerði, and Garðskagi, however, the physical margin remains as unforgiving as it was in 1649. Step off the asphalt road or gravel track onto the coastal turf between May and August, and the sky immediately drops on your head: thousands of nesting Arctic terns (Sterna paradisaea, locally kría), having just flown from Antarctica to lay their eggs in the moss, will dive-bomb any intruder without a hat or raised stick, striking hard enough with their sharp red beaks to draw blood from an bare scalp.
Walk down past the rusting steel ribs of an old fishing hull on the Garðskagi beach (often confused by tourists with the Garðar BA 64 whaler hundreds of kilometers away in the Westfjords) and kneel on the wet rock at low tide, and you can spot tiny, bottle-green crystals of olivine glinting inside the black tholeiitic lava. Just do not turn your back on the water while looking at them. Because the submarine Reykjanes Ridge drops off steeply offshore without a wide continental shelf to trip incoming swells, wave trains from distant Greenland storms periodically lock into phase, sending a constructive-interference sneaker wave surging across the slippery, brown-algae-coated (Fucus) basalt shelves into four-degree currents.
Up on the wind-scraped plateau of Miðnesheiði, where the automated white domes of the modern radar station still spin inside their security fences a few kilometers south of the bulldozed pads of Rockville, the wind keeps scrubbing the yellow gravel. Picture those clear plexiglass plotting boards again: red grease-pencil coordinates written backward by young airmen watching the dark sky over a peninsula where nothing stays standing for long unless it is built low under the fog, walled in with turf and stone, or chiselled deep into the basalt.
A STORY. NOT A GUIDE.
ICELAND. TOLD.
Quick Facts: Suðurnesjabær (Garður, Sandgerði, Garðskagi & Hvalsnes)
| Feature / Attribute | Verified Field Detail |
|---|---|
| Location & Municipality | Northern tip of the Reykjanes Peninsula (Rosmhvalanes / Miðnes), 10 km north of Keflavík Airport; formed in June 2018 by merging Sandgerði and Garður into Suðurnesjabær. |
| The Two Lighthouses (Garðskagi) | Old Lighthouse (1897): 11.4 m squat square tower (Iceland's 2nd-oldest concrete building), built low to shine under coastal fog (64.0831, -22.6942). New Lighthouse (1944): 28 m cylindrical tower designed by Axel Sveinsson: the tallest lighthouse in Iceland (Fl W 5s, 15 NM range). |
| Medieval & Maritime Heritage | Skagagarður: 1.5 km medieval turf-and-stone wall between Útskálar and Kirkjuból that gave Garður its name. Garður Folk Museum: Houses the 1887 six-oared rowboat Fram and Guðni Ingimundarson's 60+ marine engines. |
| Sandgerði Science & 1936 Wreck | Suðurnes Science and Learning Center (Þekkingarsetur Suðurnesja) in Sandgerði displays Iceland's only stuffed walrus and the memorial archive of Jean-Baptiste Charcot's research ship Pourquoi-Pas? (wrecked Sept 16, 1936 across Faxaflói at Álftanes á Mýrum; 39 dead, 1 survivor). |
| Hvalsneskirkja & Rockville | Hvalsneskirkja (1887): Basalt and driftwood/Jamestown-timber church housing the 1649 gravestone of poet Hallgrímur Pétursson's daughter Steinunn (found under the walkway in 1964). Rockville Air Station (operational 1953–1997; demolished 2004): Cold War US radar base on Miðnesheiði. |
| Primary Field Hazards | Aggressive Arctic tern (kría) scalp strikes in nesting areas (May–August); sneaker waves sweeping over slippery, algae-coated (Fucus) olivine basalt ledges into 4°C water; sudden sea-fog and winter whiteouts. |
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Why is the town of Garður called "The Garden" when it sits on a rocky, windswept coast?
In Old Norse and medieval Icelandic, garðr (garður) meant a defensive wall or earthen enclosure rather than a flower garden. The town takes its name from Skagagarður, a 1,500-meter-long medieval turf-and-stone rampart built across the base of the Garðskagi headland between Útskálar and Kirkjuból to keep livestock out of the coastal hayfields and block the salt wind.
Why are there two lighthouses right next to each other at Garðskagi?
The squat 11.4-meter Old Garðskagi Lighthouse, built in 1897 as Iceland's second-oldest concrete building, was intentionally constructed low to the ground so its beam would shine horizontally underneath the low coastal fog layer. Over the next five decades, North Atlantic storm waves eroded the basalt point right up to the 1897 foundation, prompting engineers to build the 28-meter New Garðskagi Lighthouse, the tallest lighthouse in Iceland, further inland in 1944.
What is the story behind the child's gravestone inside Hvalsneskirkja?
Between 1644 and 1651, Iceland's most famous seventeenth-century poet, Hallgrímur Pétursson, served as parish priest at Hvalsnes south of Sandgerði. When his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Steinunn Hallgrímsdóttir died in 1649, he hand-carved her epitaph into a slab of local basalt. Lost when the old turf churches were rebuilt, the gravestone was rediscovered in 1964 lying face-down as a paving stone in the walkway leading to the 1887 stone church door.
What was Rockville Air Station between Sandgerði and Garður?
Opened by the US military in October 1953 on the heath of Miðnesheiði, after temporary operations near Keflavík beginning in 1952, Rockville Air Station ("Little America") was a Cold War radar outpost guarding the GIUK air gap. Technicians inside windowless concrete rooms tracked Soviet bombers by writing coordinates backward in grease pencil on transparent plexiglass plotting boards, while airmen used refrozen snowbanks to block winter drafts under their Quonset huts. The base closed in 1997 as the squadron moved to Keflavík; its buildings were bulldozed in 2004.
Related Iceland Explained Episodes
- Iceland’s First Breath: Keflavík, Hafnir & Njarðvík: Drive ten minutes south from Sandgerði and Hvalsnes to the 1881 Jamestown stranding coast at Hafnir and the former NATO main base at Keflavík.
- Reykjanes Lighthouse & Valahnúkamöl: Eldey and the Great Auk: Compare the 1897 and 1944 lighthouses of Garðskagi at the northern tip of Reykjanes with Iceland's oldest lighthouse family at the southwestern tip of the peninsula.
- Reykjanes Rift Trinity: Bridge Between Continents, Stampar & Sandvík: Follow the western coast road south from Hvalsneskirkja to the open tectonic fissures where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge comes ashore.
