Welcome to something of a sneak peek at a new series for 2024, in which I look at everywhere I’ve been and fill in the gaps, the places and experiences I just haven’t written about for various reasons. There are at least five stories missing from Helsinki back in May so those are definitely coming and I don’t think I’ll ever finish writing about my year abroad in Switzerland. For now, this one right here is the only one that’s missing from Iceland – I think. I’ve covered a lot of Iceland! Also, let the amount of blue skies and seas in this picture remind you that even if it’s cold, the world doesn’t have to be grey and miserable with it – is your Thursday grey and miserable because mine kind of is. Anyway, welcome to Nauthólsvík, Iceland’s warm geothermal beach, right in the heart of Reykjavik.
That is, it’s behind the Domestic Airport and Perlan. You’re probably not going to want to walk from downtown Reykjavik. You can drive or get a taxi but my preferred way of getting around Reykjavik is by bus. The stop you’re after is HR, Háskólinn í Reykjavík, which is the university, and you get there by bus 5 from BSI or Hlemmur. Trouble is, that route only runs on weekends, bank holidays and after 6pm on weekdays. Otherwise, you have to take the 8, which literally just runs between the old Ring Road and the university during the day on weekdays – that’s the bus stop on the road that runs past the BSI – the Reykjavik side, not the main road side.
Logistics aside, now we know how to get there, let’s talk about Nauthólsvík (pronounced, roughly for tourists, “noyt-holes-vik).
Nauthólsvík is a big splash of golden sand, a rare thing in Iceland where most beaches are black, the sand ground down from lava and volcanic rock. Yellow sand isn’t entirely unknown, nor red, but I have a deep and abiding conviction that Nauthólsvík is not in any way natural. That’s not a bad thing. Iceland has a lot of natural hot water brought up the surface via boreholes to heat homes and businesses and to generate electricity and I can entirely understand why someone might make an artificial beach that they can pour that hot water onto to make a warm swimmable beach in a country where only the maddest take to the oceans.
Because that’s what they’ve made. Nauthólsvík’s beach is raised a good few feet above the level of the bay at low tide, the opening in the sea wall marked by a rope but at high tide, the bay spills onto the sand, making a safe and sheltered place to swim in the sea – and of course, you can swim past the rope and out into the open bay if you want to and you know how to be safe. At low tide, most of the water seeps away, leaving a shallow dish-shaped beach with a big puddle in the bottom. That’s how it was when I visited. “Puddle” is understating it a bit. It’s a large dish and down by the opening in the sea wall, it’s plenty deep enough to swim in. But it’s a gentle enough dish that there’s plenty of room higher up for just paddling, which is all I did.
The focal point of Nauthólsvík is the big round concrete hotpot in the middle of the beach. I gather this is only filled and open in the summer because when I was there in April, it was empty. Hot water continued to flow from the spout below the pot but it didn’t warm the puddle much. As long as I kept strictly to its stream – surprisingly visible considering hot water and cold water should look identical – I could keep my feet warm. Step half an inch away from the stream and it was freezing. I guess it’s likely that when the hotpot is full and presumably overflowing, this puddle would be warmer, not to mention that it would perhaps be warmer in general in the summer – see my faith in the warm Icelandic summer! At high tide, this pot is surrounded by water and you have to paddle or swim out to it, presumably through water that has at least had the freeze taken off it by the volume of warm water in the pot.
I was there on a very sunny bank holiday Monday following a very rainy and breezing Easter weekend in April 2022. All sorts of people were on Nauthólsvík. In the big puddle there were people in swimsuits and neoprene booties & gloves. Kids in snowsuits and wellies. Kids lying on the hot water pipe in swimsuits. People like me, in the clothes necessary for a sunny but not overly hot spring day, with our boots in our hands, paddling in the shallow water. I’d have liked to see the hotpot full, to see this famous warm beach in all its glory at Easter but I did get a taste of how popular it is.
Higher up on the beach is the building that I call the beach club. It’s a concrete structure with changing rooms and hot showers and a sauna and outside, out of reach of presumably all but the most freakish storm high tides, is a long low communal hotpot, the sort I unflatteringly call “a trough”. That hot water sparkled in the sun and steamed in the chilly air and I swear, half of Reykjavik was sitting in it. Well, it was a sunny day when most people aren’t at work after a miserable bank holiday weekend. Of course half of Reykjavik is on the warm beach! The other half, I learned later that day, were sunning themselves at Laugardalslaug, the big swimming pool complex.
I’d have liked to go and join them in the hotpot but I don’t think there was space for so much as a caterpillar in there, let alone another human. I can only imagine what it must be like in actual summer. This is why they made Nauthólsvík – even people who live on a cold wet explosive grey island in the north Atlantic want to swim at the beach. There’s definitely room for another relatively big geothermal tourist attraction if someone built another beach like this elsewhere on the coast, probably along the west coast, maybe at Akranes. The locals obviously love it and tourists will go anywhere they’re told to. Yeah, there’s scope for a second or third geothermal beach.
I don’t spend a lot of time in Reykjavik in the summer. If the weather is good enough for me to drive around and camp (ie not snowing), I’m out in the countryside. But I would like to maybe spend a day or two at one end of a trip in the city just so I can go to Nauthólsvík when everything’s properly open. The beach club seems to be open year-round and winter sea swimming has been open since 2006 but I feel like the hotpot in the sand is the key part that I want to experience properly.
If you want to see what Nauthólsvík looks like in motion, this is my vlog from that trip and the video will start on the Monday with me setting out for the geothermal beach.