Is Krauma overpriced and overrated?

Posted on by Julie

You know me. I’m a simple soul. I see hot water and I bathe in it. And in Iceland, hot water is abundant because it literally comes out of the ground and on this trip, I made my first visit to Krauma, a geothermal spa in the west coast region which has been on my to-do list for more than six years. The name means “simmer”, by the way.

Me, wearing a bright blue swimsuit with a polar bear on the front, lying in a shallow black hotpot. Behind me, three other hotpots are visible. It's cloudy but I'm still wearing my sunglasses.

When I first went to Iceland more than ten years ago, there were only three geothermal spas operating, and Fontana was just a baby of six months old. At my current count, there are eight – eight luxury experiences involving geothermal hot water. I’m not counting the beer spa because beer doesn’t actually come out of the ground. In 2016, I spied an article about a new spa in the Grapevine and I cut it out to remind me to go and visit when it opened. That opening was now five years ago…

A slightly yellowed newspaper clipping stuck into a scrapbook with a piece of stripy washi tape. The article is only about 50 words. It explains about Deildartunguhver and reports on what Krauma will be like.

Now, I don’t want to be cynical but when you’ve got hot water coming out of the ground and you can see tourists packed shoulder-to-shoulder into the Blue Lagoon, of course you’re going to think about opening your own. None of them have seen the success of the Blue Lagoon and none of them ever will – reputation plus proximity to the airport plus hundreds of tour buses a day going there is a combination you just can’t beat. But you don’t need to squeeze people in like sardines to make a good amount of money and none of the four spas/lagoons that I visited on this trip were anywhere near as quiet as I’d like them to be. Tour buses in every car park! Just not tour buses on the same scale as at the daddy of these attractions.

Iceland has developed a pool culture roughly equivalent to Britain’s pub culture. It’s the place where you hang out after work with your mates, except that instead of drinking beer, you sit in a hot tub until your skin has the right texture to make a handbag out of it. The majority of local pools are outdoors, almost all are naturally heated and they almost invariably have at least two hot pots. The lagoons and spas are really for the tourists – why would you pay that much to sit in hot water surrounded by people speaking English and French when you could walk to the end of your road and sit in hot water with your Icelandic mates for a fraction of the price?

The reality is that if you’ve got spare hot water, you can rinse tourists in it. I speak as a tourist who will jump into any geothermal pool I can find! The excuse, though, is that it’s about connection to the landscape, to the water. The Blue Lagoon and Nature Baths make as much as they can of the mineral-rich water while trying not to say that’s it’s run-off from the power stations next door. Fontana has built steam baths over the natural vents in the lakeside and then paired this raw heat with some unusually clean & clinical tiled pools. The Secret Lagoon is fed by a collection of geysirs and hot springs around its perimeter and made something of a feature of them.

The view from the front tub at Krauma. In the foreground is a pool turning to a stream of run-off water from the tubs. The stream is heading down the hill towards a big cloud of steam which is the hot spring Deildartunguhver.

Krauma’s USP is also its connection to the natural hot springs; in this case Deildartunguhver, Europe’s biggest hot spring, a stream of violently bubbling and exploding water running around a small hillock of its own building, issuing enough steam to see it from the campsite a mile or two away in the valley opposite where I started writing this. The spring is front and centre – its six hot pots are arranged in a little courtyard where black walls funnel the views from the front pot right over the hot spring bubbling away.

Krauma seen from the path approaching the front door. There is a high black wall with a wide gap in it. The front hot pot protrudes from this gap. Behind the hotpot is a square black building with large glass windows and behind that, there's another black building with a more pointed roof that's not part of the Krauma facility.

If you’ve read any of my other posts about spas and lagoons in Iceland, you may have noticed the tone is a little different here. I like Krauma and it was definitely a bucket-list item – I cut an article out of the Grapevine in 2016 when it was still being built to remind me to go and visit when it was done and it’s taken six years! – but even I, as a huge geothermal fan, can’t help noticing that… well, hasn’t Krauma just taken what you get at your local pool, painted it black and quadrupled the price?

A map of Krauma's hotpots on a dark wooden wall. The photo is taken with my GoPro so the edges of the map are all curved. It shows six blue circles - well, four circles and two pear-shapes surrounded by an assortment of black squares which are the buildings.

Part of the fun of a lot of the other spas is the lagoon aspect, a pool large enough to swim in and deep enough to not kick the bottom on every stroke. You can float. You can move around. When you take that away and replace it with an assortment of hot pots in various temperatures and depths, somehow you break the spell that you’re getting more than you would at the local pool. Even the “eyes forward, look at Deildartunguhver, look at how our hot water is coming straight from the ground less than 100m away!” can’t quite disguise that there isn’t actually anything very special here.

Deildartunguhver in 2014. A stream of boiling water sends up fountains and a ludicrous amount of steam. Tourists are kept out of the water by a wooden fence. By 2022, it's been replaced by a higher stainless steel fence but it was producing too much steam to get as good a photo as this last week.

It’s style over substance. I must admit, it’s very stylish. Part of the Secret Lagoon’s charm is that it’s very rustic. Fontana is shiny but almost in a 90s way, starting to look a little worn. The Blue Lagoon is stylish in a sort of clinical-space age hybrid way. Krauma looks good. Is it the best-looking of all the spas I’ve ever been in? The Sky Lagoon is a close contender, albeit in a very different way. Krauma is all black marble, overhung by square black buildings that contain the steam room, sauna and relax room with real log fire. Shiny black walls. Just one “window” onto the real world, where you can see the hot spring and the cliff-like mountains behind, just to emphasise how nature made this place possible. I bet it looks amazing in the winter when the landscape is all snow.

Taken from the shallow cooler pot at the front left - overlooking the deeper pot that looks out of the front. Behind that is a hotter raised pot and behind that, the square building housing the changing rooms and restaurant.

Taken from the edge of the shallower warm pot at the back: you can see the two raised hotter pots in front. Behind them are the lower pot that sticks out the front and the shallow one off to the left, which you can't really see because it's behind the relax room. You can see the glass windows and part of the square roof. Out the front, you can see the sun shining on the mountains beyond and I think you can see a hint of steam from the hot spring.

But ultimately, all you’re getting is five hot pots and a cold plunge pot that happens to be a bit prettier than normal – the cold pot is often a bit “agricultural-industrial chic”. If you go to Laugardalslaug, the big public pool in Reykjavik, you get four hot pots, a large social pot, a saltwater spa and a cold pot, plus the 50m outdoor and indoor pools. You forgive other spas because the big lagoon with the opaque water is a novelty and it doesn’t feel like you’re just overpricing everyday facilities, or because you really feel the presence of the natural hot water. I should feel the latter at Krauma. It’s right there! You have to walk past Deildartunguhver to get to Krauma and believe me, it’s not the sort of hot spring you can walk by without noticing it. But the experience at the spa just isn’t exciting enough or novel enough to feel like you’re connecting with the spring.

Me lying on my side in the shallow pool. The sky above is black and looks like it's about to pour with rain but there's a bright sunbeam on my face and on the dark concrete wall behind me.

Oh, I don’t say I didn’t enjoy Krauma. I stayed there more than four hours! I only left because I was starving and had no idea where I was camping and wanted to get settled for the night before all the campsite receptions closed. If I’m in the area – and I do like the west of Iceland – I daresay I’ll go back and I’ll enjoy another four hours in the hot water with the view of the spring and a lingering feeling that I’ve been overcharged.

Me sitting in the deeper pool at the back, drinking from a pint/half litre glass of Pepsi. In the background, a woman in a hi-viz jacket is fetching cycle race winners from the hot tubs. Yep.

Perhaps that’s what it is. Krauma isn’t exciting enough to feel like it overpowers its location – which is a gravel car park that probably belongs to a farm. Fontana sits right there in its location, on the edge of the warm lake. The Nature Baths’ location, on the side of an active volcano, is half the magic. The Secret Lagoon is a duckpond in a village that’s been turned into something of a luxury experience and it makes you feel like you’ve stumbled on something authentic. The Blue Lagoon absolutely owns its location next to a space-age power station, in the middle of a black lava field. Krauma is a set of hot tubs on the edge of a car park.

Krauma from the front hotpot. You can see the raised hotter pots behind and the square main building behind that.

Oh, I don’t know. Once you start questioning whether this spa is “special enough”, you start to wonder what your favourites actually have to offer. Why do I only feel this towards this one? Is because I’ve been looking forward to it for so long? Am I getting cynical in my old age? Why is Fontana any more special or worthy than Krauma?

Perhaps part of what makes Krauma special is the restaurant – when I opened my banking app this morning to find out how much each campsite cost and to compare the prices of the spas, I discovered that the transactions – one for entrance, one for buying that Pepsi – are listed under the name “Krauma Restaurant”. rather than “Krauma geothermal spa (and also we have a restaurant)”. Obviously, I didn’t sample the restaurant but for a place this shiny, I imagine it’s a half-decent restaurant, even if it’s likely the only one within fifty miles. No, it’s in the middle of the countryside in a part of Iceland that’s not quite as overflowing with tourists as other places. It does a grilled lamb, a slow-cooked cod, a burger with local beef and a vegan salad-y thing. I don’t know how much those sorts of things generally cost, let alone how much they cost in Iceland but it seems a little more expensive compared to the burgers and fish dishes at Efstidalur II, which is a farm/restaurant/ice cream cafe on the Golden Circle where I went in 2018 with my new friends from the Laugavegur trail. You can sit in the restaurant and look down on the cows that made your burger – or rather, the cows that will make burgers in the future.

A cowshed at Efstidalur II, where pretty cows are eating huge piles of hay, seen from above. If you look carefully, you can see that this is taken through a window and that there are reflections of people sitting at tables. This is the view from the restaurant, so you can see exactly where your burger came from.

But the presence of a restaurant doesn’t make Krauma special. The Blue Lagoon has a very good – or at least, expensive – restaurant attached. Fontana has a cafe where you can sample rye bread cooked in the hot springs in the sand around the lake. I think most of the others have unremarkable cafes attached. No, Krauma should stand and fall on its geothermal offering and on the whole, I don’t think it stands as well as I’d have liked.

Taken from the back pool, looking towards the black wooden wall at the back of the complex, where a few robes and towels are hanging from hooks. The water in the hot tub is actually a surprisingly bright blue, although the black pool makes it a lot less obvious in every other photo.