Iceland Part Five: A Walking Tour

This is the part where I go through the sights I saw as I wandered around Reykjavik that don’t fit into their own category. I did not see all of these things in the same day, so please don’t try and replicate the tour, you may find yourself with very sore feet!

One impressive building, only opened in 2011, is the Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre, which hosts international events and concerts. It was designed by Olafur Eliasson and in a theme common in Icelandic design, it was built to reflect the surrounding landscape.

The interior is just as impressive as the exterior, where you can better see the coloured glass.

There is also the City Hall, which all the guidebooks describe as strikingly modern, but which I’m afraid I wasn’t at all keen on; it looked a bit coldy industrial to me. There is a supposedly impressive map of Iceland inside but I never actually saw that for myself.

But it does have the advantage of being right next to the City Pond – which is much larger than the name suggests and actually resembles a lake rather than a pond.

And naturally it is home to a large number of swans and ducks.

I also took a walk along the seaside path, which is a great way of seeing both the city and the mountains surrounding Reykjavik.

Along the seawall, and only marked as “viewpoint” on my map, is the Solfar Suncraft Sculpture, which represents a Viking ship and is a really beautiful piece of artwork.

Also just by the seawall is Hofoi House, where Ronald Regan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in 1986, a step towards the end of the Cold War.

And now a flavour of some of the other things that caught my eye on my travels:

Below, the Lutheran Cathedral:

As you can see, Reykjavik is a very pretty city with lots of things to see and do which don’t require spending any money!