Snæfellsjökull

Snæfellsjökull National Park was established in 2001 at the western tip of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, in western Iceland, and protects some 170 km². It was the first Icelandic national park to reach the shoreline.

Its centre is Snæfellsjökull, a stratovolcano of some 1,446 metres crowned by an ice cap, visible from Reykjavík on clear days more than a hundred kilometres away across Faxaflói bay. The volcano has erupted several times in the Holocene and its glacier has lost surface at an accelerating rate in recent decades; in 2012 it was left without snow in summer for the first time.

The mountain has a singular literary standing: Jules Verne chose it as the entrance to the underground world in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, published in 1864, and ever since the volcano has carried an esoteric fame that draws visitors of every kind. The park also protects recent lava flows, lava tubes such as Vatnshellir, beaches of black and golden sand, cliffs with seabird colonies and the remains of old fishing villages such as Dritvík, which in the eighteenth century was one of the largest fishing stations in Iceland.