THE MUSIC & NATURE OF SOUTHERN ICELAND

Soaking at Vesturbæjarlaug neighborhood pool

Our home in the city. The CenterHotel Plaza is a stylish haven in the heart of Reykjavík, blending modern comfort with Icelandic design. Its location on the central square makes the whole city walkable — the harbor, the galleries, the record shops, the bakeries. The sleek rooms offer a peaceful retreat, and the on-site restaurant and bar serve local cuisine and handcrafted cocktails. Tonight is calm on purpose: recover from the flight and the time change.

Family-style lunch at Ráðagerði in Grótta

9:30 ~ Check Out and Depart for the Southern Coast

We begin our five-day journey eastward to see the best of Iceland's glorious southern coast.

Departing Reykjavík for the south coast

16:30 ~ Arrive at UMI Hotel and Check In

Our home for the next two nights sits at the foot of Eyjafjallajökull — the volcano that closed European airspace in 2010 — two kilometers off the ring road on a windswept plain between the mountains and the black-sand coast. UMI is a low, spare, modernist building that looks severe from the outside and is anything but within: twenty-eight light-filled rooms softened with wool rugs and pale wood, floor-to-ceiling windows framing either the mountains or the sea, and a lounge bar with the volcano itself in view. It is family-run, small enough to stay under the tour-bus radar, and blessed with a first-rate restaurant looking out toward the Westman Islands. The river Svaðbælisá runs past the property, horses graze the field, and a black beach lies within walking distance. We are also perfectly placed — Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss are each about fifteen minutes away in opposite directions.

UMI Hotel beneath Eyjafjallajökull

Cake and songs at Valborg Ólafsdóttir's country home

10:30 ~ Dyrhólaey Point

We'll stop at this lighthouse set on a headland above the sea, where a massive stone arch juts into the water — Dyrhólaey means "Arch Island" — with black beaches stretching away below and columnar basalt underfoot. Puffins nest in the cliffs here through the summer, and if nature permits we'll see them close up.

11:30 ~ Skaftafell Glacier

One of the most beautiful locations in the region, where white fingers of the Vatnajökull ice cap — Europe's largest glacier — reach down between green slopes and black sand.

13:30 ~ Jökulsárlón: Lunch and Glacial Lagoon Boat Tour

A lagoon of turquoise icebergs floating in a body of mixed fresh and salt water, on the edge of Vatnajökull National Park — the deepest lake in Iceland, and the farthest east we travel before turning back. The lagoon did not exist a century ago; it is meltwater, and it grows every year, which makes it one of the few places where you can watch climate change happen on a human timescale. It has stood in for other worlds in "Batman Begins," "Tomb Raider," and two James Bond films, and for Bon Iver's "Holocene." We'll begin with lunch on your own from the food trucks or cafeteria, then take a 30-minute sail among the icebergs on an amphibious boat, taste ice that fell as snow a thousand years ago, and — with luck — see seals surfacing between the floes. (Cost of lunch not included.)

Boat tour among the icebergs at Jökulsárlón

15:00 ~ Diamond Beach

Icebergs calve from the lagoon, wash out to sea, and return to shore, where they lie scattered across black volcanic sand like cut diamonds. It's a favorite of photographers and wildlife enthusiasts, home to many seals, and one of the best places in the country to spot orcas from land.

Icebergs on the black sand of Diamond Beach

15:30 ~ Return West

We'll take a scenic detour on a smaller road through the coastal countryside, stopping for photographs along the way. Throughout our drives, we curate a selection of Iceland's finest music to accompany the landscape.

Ófærufoss waterfall in the Eldgjá fissure

Return to the Hotel to Relax; Dinner on Your Own

We return to the Magma Hotel for a second night.

Highland landscape on the drive back from Eldgjá

The mossy rim of Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon

10:00 ~ Eldhraun Lava Field

The largest lava field produced by a single eruption anywhere on earth — roughly 565 square kilometers, about ten Manhattans — laid down by the Laki eruption of 1783–84. That eruption is the reason this landscape carries so much grief. Over eight months, a 25-kilometer fissure poured out fourteen cubic kilometers of lava and an estimated 120 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide. The haze poisoned grazing land, killed most of the livestock, and starved roughly a fifth of Iceland's population; crops failed across Europe, and historians have argued the resulting hardship helped set the conditions for the French Revolution.

Today the whole expanse is under a continuous blanket of woolly fringe moss, pale green and soft-looking, so that the deadliest thing that ever happened to this country now resembles a bedspread. NASA brought Apollo astronauts here in the 1960s to practice walking on a landscape with no life in it. The moss takes a century to recover from a single footstep, so we'll stay on the marked paths and viewing areas.

The moss-covered Eldhraun lava field

11:00 ~ Þakgil

Þakgil means "Roof Canyon," and the name is a promise: a gravel track climbs north from Vík through black volcanic desert, and then, without warning, the landscape opens into a green hanging valley walled by moss-covered cliffs that lean inward overhead. Mýrdalsjökull and the Katla volcano sit just above it. The cliffs block the wind that scours everything around it, so the valley holds its own small climate — sheltered, quiet, threaded with streams and waterfalls. Nobody comes here. There are no buses, no shops, and nothing to buy. We'll walk a short way among the ravines and take in what is, by common agreement among Icelanders, one of the loveliest places in the south.