Iceland will never run out of interesting and unusual places to bathe, whether it’s a new tourist-oriented geothermal experience or a warm pool in a field you’ve just stumbled upon (if you do find a pool in a field, maybe check up on whether the landowner minds you being there and whether it’s a safe temperature to dip in?) and this trip’s unusual new geothermal experience was Nauthólsvík, Reykjavik’s geothermal beach.
Because the entire country is made of lava, Iceland’s beaches tend to be on the grey-black spectrum. I’m pretty sure there’s one golden one somewhere and there’s a red one in the Westfjords but black is the norm. Well, Nauthólsvík is golden. That’s because it’s an artificial beach made out of imported sand. Fine. Many popular beaches have some help these days, thanks to coastal erosion. But Nauthólsvík isn’t really about protecting or maintaining the coastline. It’s about making use of one of Iceland’s most abundant natural resources: hot water. If you can use geothermal hot water to keep runways or city streets ice-free, or to generate more electricity than one small country can use, why can’t you use it to give the inhabitants of that country a nice beach experience despite its non-beach-friendly climate?
The centrepiece is the hot tub on the sand which is filled with natural warm water – except at high tide when the cold water from the fjord rises over the mouth of the rocky inlet separating the two and flooding the beach with freezing water. I’m not sure whether it actually overwhelms the hot tub but I’ve definitely seen pictures of it cut off by the tide. I was there at low tide so it was pleasantly warm and I had it to myself, hence selfies!
When the tide drains away, it leaves a pool in the sand. Hot water dribbles out from underneath the hot tub and mixes with the cold water, making a shallow pool of not unpleasant temperature. If you stay directly in the line of the hot water and don’t go more than about four feet from where it trickles in.
That means a warm beach with warm water! This is also a good spot for accessing the fjord – next door is a watersports centre with its own beach and a slipway and people either use that or climb over the rocks to just swim in the sea. Most of the ones I saw had neoprene booties and gloves on but if I was mad enough to swim in the sea in Iceland, even in June, I’d have a winter-weight wetsuit on at the very least. If you do want to do this, Nauthólsvík is probably the best place for it. The North Atlantic is a wild place and I’d want some serious advice and the company of local experts before I went deeper than ankle-deep anywhere else around the country.
Where there’s warm water and an expectation of bathers, there are often facilities and Nauthólsvík has something I’m inclined to describe as a beach club. It’s a wooden building that combines changing rooms and a small shop with rooftop views. You have to pay to use it and get given a wristband for the day and then you can change inside and leave your clothes in a basket on a shelf. There are small lockers for valuables but this is all a lot more rustic than your average pool. It’s a beach. Naturally, you have to shower in the Icelandic tradition – there was a group of American students who emerged one by one saying things like “I need a drink after the things I’ve seen” and “Yeah, this place is ok… kind of traumatising, though”. It’s just a public naked shower. It happens everywhere, although once the entry price hits around £40, they start to include a private cubicle and once it gets to about £60, it’s nothing but private cubicles. Tourists hate public nudity and Iceland hates unwashed people in pools so that’s the compromise.
But Nauthólsvík is rustic. Communal showers.
The jewel of the beach club is the hot tub. It’s quite shallow but it stretches for most of the length of the changing building and it’s the perfect way to enjoy the geothermal beach without getting too close to the non-geothermal water. It’s concrete with just a bit of sand in the bottom. People who’ve been out onto the beach instinctively shower off before returning to the long hot tub but you can’t escape that bit of sand stuck to your feet. You’re at the beach.
At the far end of the facilities building is a sauna, which is what the outdoor showers are really for. Sauna rules can be intimidating and saunas often assume you know them without troubling to tell you but in Iceland, saunas are strictly textile zones. None of this “no swimwear and sit on a towel” nonsense. Nudity is strictly for the changing rooms.
Nauthólsvík’s one big disadvantage is that it’s not that easy to get to. It’s on the seashore beyond the Domestic airport. Now, I walked to Perlan and it’s a reasonably easy stroll down the hill but Perlan itself is a bus ride or taxi for many tourists. There’s a bus, the 5, that takes you to HR, the university stop a five-minute walk away, but it only runs down that far in the evening and at weekends. I was there on a Thursday, trying to get back to my room in the drizzle an hour and a half or so before the first bus of the evening was due. If you walk along the seafront, through the construction work, to the other side of the airport, which is about a kilometre away, there are more regular daytime buses. In the drizzle, and without my waterproofs, that wasn’t a lot of fun but at least the bus appeared around thirty seconds after I’d ascertained I was in the right place. And it went all the way through to my nearest bus stop – no changes required! But next time, I might try to arrange things so I could meet the 5.
Yes, it was absolutely worth it for a couple of hours on the geothermal beach. No, I didn’t swim in the fjord. Yes, I sat in the beach club hot tub and the hot tub on the beach and I paddled in the puddle and if you’re there in the summer, you should try it too.
I Am A Polar Bear 