An old abandoned farm on a fjord named after a cursed, murderous whale
8
Natural pools
2025
Hot springs opened
Farm
Original use of the land
30km
Length of Hvalfjörður
The Story
Before it was a hot spring resort, Hvammsvík was simply an abandoned farm on a headland — a quiet, working patch of coastline on Iceland's largest fjord. The pools themselves are new, but the land has a much longer memory, and so does the fjord it sits on.
Hvalfjörður means "Whale Fjord," and nobody agrees on exactly why. One theory says early settlers found a pod of whales beached in the shallows — a genuine windfall in a place where food security mattered enormously (the Icelandic word for a beached whale, hvalreki, still doubles as the word for "godsend"). But the story locals actually tell is stranger and more specific: a folktale about a man cursed by an elf woman he betrayed, transformed into Rauðhöfði — "Redhead" — an enormous, furious red-headed whale that terrorized this exact stretch of coast until he was finally lured into a trap. The legend runs deep enough that it named half the landmarks around you: Glymur, Iceland's tallest waterfall, sits at the head of this same fjord; so does Hvalfell (Whale Mountain) and Lake Hvalvatn (Whale Lake) — all named for the same cursed creature.
A cursed man, an angry whale, and a fjord that still carries his name.
The fjord has a very different, much more recent history too. During WWII, Allied forces built a major naval base here — ruins are still scattered along the shoreline, easy to spot if you know to look. And in the 1940s, Hvalfjörður briefly boomed as the center of Iceland's "herring adventure," when massive schools of herring packed the bay and fishing crews worked around the clock.
As You Walk Around
Easy to miss if you're not looking
Watch where the ocean actually meets the pools. At high tide, cold seawater genuinely mixes into the geothermal water — the temperature you feel really does shift depending on when you're there, which is unusual even by Icelandic hot-spring standards.
Look for seals. They're occasionally spotted right offshore from the pools — not guaranteed, but a real possibility given how undisturbed this stretch of coast still is.
Notice how little is actually built here. Compared to a resort like Blue Lagoon, Hvammsvík is deliberately minimal — the point is the land and the fjord, not the architecture.
Fun Trivia
Things most visitors don't know
Whales haven't actually been common here for a very long time — the last confirmed sighting in the bay was a family of orcas in 1998. The fjord's whole identity is built on a name whose origin nobody can fully confirm.
Icelandic folklore says the fjord is also home to hidden people. Local legend places a hermit — one of Iceland's huldufólk, or "hidden people" — living inside a specific rock along the shore, sometimes called Staupa-Steinn.
Most travelers drive right past Hvalfjörður entirely. The Ring Road now runs through a tunnel under the fjord, so anyone not deliberately taking Route 47 around the coast — like you are — never sees any of this at all.