Another throwback, or another gap filled in my past travels. I’ve written reams on the Blue Lagoon by now but I’ve never done my first visit.
It was 2011, it was December and it was my first trip to Iceland. I’d like to say the Blue Lagoon was the first thing I booked – it was certainly the first thing in Iceland I knew about – but the email receipts don’t lie. I booked it, the Golden Circle, the lava caving and a Northern Lights tour on the same booking.
I booked the Blue Lagoon for my last day, a kind of big finish to the trip. I was less than 18 months into discovering that I’m a spa person so I’d planned to be there the whole day but the state of Icelandic tourism in late 2011 was that a bus to Reykjavik would turn up every hour and you’d just get on it and it would almost never be over-filled, so I could pretty much leave when I fancied it. In those days, you didn’t have to book in advance, either, although I had. I don’t remember whether I took my own towel but I definitely added a robe and possibly slippers while checking in. Tip for 2026: you will wear the robe from the showers to the side of the pool and then you’ll hang it up and never figure out which is yours ever again. Waste of money.
In 2011, only the downstairs changing rooms existed, I think. I used my bracelet to open the turnstile, I probably left my boots on the racks and then I went and faced the two biggest obstacles to the world’s most famous spa: how to work the locker with the bracelet, and the ritual naked shower.
Now, it was December and it wasn’t even a particularly nice December day. But that pool put me under a spell immediately. You can go out the door and walk to the edge of the lagoon or you can enter via the indoor pool connection, so when you push open the incredibly heavy side door, you’re already submerged in warm water. I will almost always pick that option, even in summer.
I think the cave immediately outside the side door has been demolished but there used to be a dome-like artificial cave where you could sit in the dark and listen to something. Can’t remember if it was ambient music or if it was an introduction to the Blue Lagoon. I’ve definitely invented at least one of those but I honestly don’t know which.
Then you go under the bridge into the main Lagoon and on the right there used to be a map, in an annoyingly stylised style, that showed you where everything was. The bar was to your right, just at the bottom of the outdoor ramp, and to your left was a plastic bucket of white algae face mask with a ladle attached to it and wooden slats protecting it from the worst of the rain. Yeah, you used to be able to just help yourself.
To the left of that, up against the building, was the steam room, which was something of a hobbit house and very different from the whites, greys and mints of the rest of the facility; the sauna; the waterfall and a roped-off quiet area for in-water massages.
Other than that, it was just a big lagoon. It’s always fun to go back and find new bays that I swear weren’t there last time, or bays that seem to have vanished. I popped in back in the summer, not to go in the water, and took some pictures from the cafe inside, and apart from the fact that they’ve built a new steam room and sauna (the Sky Lagoon had a bigger window in their sauna and that just Wasn’t On), it looks like there’s now a wall closing off a chunk of the lagoon.
On the other hand, as if the Blue Lagoon wasn’t expensive enough, there are now two private lagoons attached to hotels, so the place is easily three times the size it was in 2011. I’m just not sure how much is available to the average tourist now. Or maybe there’s a wall because there’s expansion work going on. It’s hard to tell, because the Blue Lagoon has been forced to do a certain amount of construction work ever since a volcanic eruption ate most of its car park. How much is a hastily-built new route; how much is there by choice?
Tourists who are Better Than You will denounce the Blue Lagoon for being too touristy, which it is but it has genuine authentic Icelandic origins (more than the Sky Lagoon does…) and it understands and copes with its tourists very well (certainly better than the Sky Lagoon does). For me in 2011, in the vanguard of the tourism tsunami, it was magical. This soft, hot water, these views of the silver, twisted, 60s scifi power station next door, the setting in the black lava, the bracelet that was entry key, locker key and credit card all in one: it was single-handedly the thing that made me fall in love with Iceland. The next day, as I ate bread and butter from the breakfast buffet in my hotel, before getting the airport bus, I thought about the Blue Lagoon and the snowy scenery and I began to plan, because I’m realistic about these things, to be living in Iceland within ten years.
Determined to make the most of my day, I stayed as late as I could. I dined on mini Babybels and salt & pepper crisps from the poolside cafe, I probably had a blue slushie or two from the in-water bar and I fetched my camera from my locker for a few photos, although I hadn’t anticipated wanting to take it in the water at that stage, so I had no way of waterproofing it.
As the afternoon went on, it got dark and a cloudy day became a sleety evening and now I learned something new: the joy of being submerged in hot water while snow fell and my hair froze. Easy to defrost, just dip under the water every five minutes.
All good things come to an end and it was time for one last discovery. My skin felt incredibly smooth and soft but my hair was crunchy and the Blue Lagoon’s conditioner did nothing to fix that. But your hair isn’t actually “destroyed”. Back at my hotel in Reykjavik, I washed it and then soaked it in my own conditioner and then it was fine.
The Blue Lagoon has changed a lot since then. Tourism in Iceland has changed a lot since then. I’ve started making plans for next year already and I’m suddenly wondering if I want to go and properly see how different it is in 2027 to 2011.