The real first European to sight North America sailed from right here — and Leif Erikson bought the man's boat to do it again, better
985 CE
Bjarni's voyage from here
1765
Húsið built — oldest timber house in Iceland
~1000
Peak population, 1920
1925
Trading port declined
The Story
You'll have already seen the statue of Leif Erikson outside Hallgrímskirkja — the explorer everyone credits with reaching North America first. Here's the part that rarely gets told: Leif wasn't actually first. A merchant named Bjarni Herjólfsson sailed from this exact spot in 985 CE, got blown off course on his way to Greenland, and sighted land that would later be called North America — he just never went ashore. When he made it to Greenland and told Leif Erikson what he'd seen, Leif bought Bjarni's ship and used it to make the actual landing everyone remembers. The man with the better story has almost no statues.
For centuries after that, Eyrarbakki was the most important trading port in southern Iceland — the hub for everything moving between Selvogur in the west and Lómagnúpur in the east, especially during the Danish trade monopoly that controlled Icelandic commerce from the 1600s onward. Danish merchant families lived here for roughly two centuries, and their houses turned this small fishing village into an unexpected outpost of European culture and fashion, at a time when most Icelanders were still living in turf houses. By 1920, nearly 1,000 people called it home — remarkable for the era.
Then, in 1925, a bridge went up over the nearby Ölfusá river, and the harbor — never great to begin with — simply fell out of use. Trade moved elsewhere, and Eyrarbakki quietly stopped growing. What's left today is essentially a preserved snapshot of the village between 1890 and 1920.
A town that peaked, then simply stopped — and never got around to modernizing over it.
As You Walk Around
Easy to miss if you're not looking
Húsið ("The House") is the oldest timber dwelling in Iceland — built in 1765 from a kit shipped over from Norway. It housed the Danish trading manager and his staff for generations, and now works as a heritage museum.
Look for the small "House of Eggs" building behind Húsið. It holds a genuinely obscure private collection: Icelandic birds and eggs gathered by Peter Nielsen, the old store manager, purely as a personal hobby.
Notice how uniformly preserved the streetscape feels. Almost everything you're looking at dates from that narrow 1890-1920 window — the town essentially stopped adding to itself once the port declined.
Fun Trivia
Things most visitors don't know
Iceland's main prison sits in this tiny village. Litla-Hraun, the country's largest correctional facility, is one of Eyrarbakki's biggest employers today — an unexpectedly modern footnote to a town frozen in the 19th century.
Iceland's oldest primary school was founded here in 1852, decades before most of the country had formal schooling at all.
Bjarni Herjólfsson's sighting predates Columbus by roughly 500 years — and even within the Viking story, he's the overlooked middle step between Iceland and the "official" discovery everyone remembers.