Iceland, The Golden Circle & South Iceland

Iceland is a young island still in the making, where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart, glaciers lie over volcanoes and hot water rises out of the ground. Icelanders have bathed in that water for centuries, and the first settlers built their farms of stone and turf, sunk into the land against the North Atlantic weather.

We open Iceland from the Golden Circle in the south, the country’s classic route of waterfalls, geysers and the rift valley at Þingvellir. Ten kilometres from Gullfoss, Torfhús Retreat keeps a small village of turf-roofed houses on the open plain, built of local stone and reclaimed wood after the Viking farm at nearby Stöng. Every Torfhús has its own basalt stone pool of geothermal water, the Torfvilla sleeps eight with a sauna and a cold plunge, and the Langjökull glacier fills the horizon.

From there the Highlands, the black sand beaches of the South Coast and the volcanoes are within a day, by road or by helicopter. With no light pollution on the plain, the northern lights can be watched from the hot pool from late September to late March, and in June and July the sun barely sets at all.