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Click on the picture to watch this audio slideshow about bird watching at Óshólmar, an area at the mouth of Eyjafjardará river just outside Akureyri in north Iceland, the largest Icelandic town outside the capital region. Not many tourists know about this attraction, which is perfect for a walk in the sun.
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Located just 40 minutes by car and six minutes from Keflavík International Airport, Sandgerdi (“Sandy Hedge”) is a growing town of 1,700 with a storied history and loads to see. Read this special promotion about the hidden secrets of one of Iceland's most charming seaside villages.
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An old coin was discovered between floor panels in a building from 1840 in Djúpivogur, southeast Iceland, currently under renovation. It has a picture of a lion hanging from an ax, which is Norway’s coat of arms, and dates back to 1653.
“It was made in Kongsberg in Norway out of Norwegian silver,” numismatist Anton Holt told Morgunbladid. “Every coin found in Iceland is significant because we didn’t have any coins ourselves.”
Until 1922, when the first Icelandic coin was made, coins were imported to Iceland. According to Holt, every year an old foreign coin is discovered in Iceland. Norwegian coins are rarer than Danish coins; 80 percent of imported coins were Danish, 15 percent Norwegian and five percent Swedish.
Holt said the fact that a coin from 1653 was discovered in a house built in 1840 shows that it was common for Icelanders to use 100 to 200-year-old coins on a daily basis before they had their own money.
The human being will be on display for the first time in its natural environment in the Reykjavík Family Park and Zoo next weekend. Visitors can observe three men and one woman in a cage after 10 am on Saturday and Sunday.
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The formal Videy island swim took place yesterday and there were three participants, two men and one woman, Thórdís Hrönn Pálsdóttir, who is the first woman to participate in the Videy swim since 1959.
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The Environment Agency intends to investigate whether the Heath Protection Authority handled the situation in Eskifjördur, east Iceland, in the correct manner when contaminated water from a trawler was carried into the town’s drinking water system.
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One hundred and forty million cubic meters of ash is estimated to have fallen in Iceland during the volcanic eruption in Eyjafjallajökull last spring. That excludes all the ash that fell into the ocean and in other countries.
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The second issue of the print edition of Iceland Review 2010 has just been published. Entitled “Under the Volcano” the magazine dedicates 20 pages, words and pictures, to the volcanic eruption in Eyjafjallajökull glacier which made headlines all over the word. New subscribers will receive the book Puffins as a gift and all subscribers are part of a draw to win a trip to Iceland. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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REVIEWS
Hendrikka Waage is an accomplished jewellery designer whose first children’s book Rikka and Her Magic Ring in Iceland, takes readers on an enchanted and educational journey through the country. It’s beautifully illustrated and a good lesson in geography, but the plot could have been better thought through and the moral of the story is a bit too prominent.
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On the third day of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption we drove from Skógar to Hvolsvöllur in total darkness, a distance of 18 kilometers. It was frightening, the darkness being so impenetrable that we could hardly see out the windows of the car. We could see faint lights from the farm standing right next to the highway.
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Ásmundur Sveinsson is among the foremost Icelandic sculptors. The current exhibition in the Ásmundur Sveinsson Museum in Reykjavík is entitled “I choose women who thrive…” and features women as symbols in the sculptor’s art. The works in the exhibition are selected from his entire career.
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