THE NAME ‘ICELAND’ seemed misleading when I visited in summer. ‘Waterland’ was more like it. On the Westfjords peninsula, which juts from northwest Iceland like a claw, water was everywhere. It cascaded in silvery filaments down green mountainsides. It rushed in streams alongside, and occasionally over gravel roads. It floated in clouds like thought bubbles above slate-blue fjords.
So it seemed appropriate that my companion Jason and I should begin our Westfjords road trip at the Library of Water (libraryofwater.is), which American artist Roni Horn created in 2007 in the coastal village of Stykkishólmur. Horn, who has a long-standing affinity for Iceland, placed 24 floor-to-ceiling glass cylinders, each filled with water from an Icelandic glacier, in a former library that overlooks the picturesque harbour. She also designed a rubberised floor inlaid with words that riff on the nation’s number-one preoccupation, its volatile weather: cool, wild, calm, foggy, dreary, oppressive, and so on. The cylinders are positioned seemingly at random, like trees in a forest—which reminded me that Iceland is mostly treeless. In the Westfjords, I didn’t see any butterflies, squirrels, or deer. Instead, there were birds and sheep. Lots of them.
Although I would have liked a few more animals, mainly I wanted to escape from the phone-clutching crowds in my New York neighbourhood. Fewer than 8,000 people live in the Westfjords. And it’s just out of the way enough to be beyond the tourist trail.
Denne historien er fra April 2020-utgaven av Travel+Leisure India.
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Denne historien er fra April 2020-utgaven av Travel+Leisure India.
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