The Midnight-Sun Issue

We begin Volume Zero where the light does — in the north, at the top of June, on an island where the sun in late June barely bothers to set. Iceland is the right place to open a magazine about where to stay, because here the question is unusually stark. The country is large and nearly empty, its sights strung along one coastal road, and the choice of where to sleep each night decides how much of the week is driving and how much is standing still.

This issue argues for restraint, which is not the advice most Iceland guides give. The instinct in June, with daylight to spare, is to attempt the whole Ring Road at speed and photograph everything. We think that is the mistake. The south coast alone — Seljalandsfoss, Skógafoss, the black beach at Reynisfjara, the glacier lagoon at Jökulsárlón — holds more than a week can properly hold. Better to base twice, drive half as far, and give the glacier lagoon a morning rather than a glance from a coach window.

We have tried, throughout, to be clear about the season's costs. June brings the near-endless light and the open interior, and it also brings the highest prices of the year and coaches at every honeypot by mid-morning. The light, handily, is also the cure: reach Gullfoss or Skógafoss at nine in the evening and the crowd has gone home while the day has not. We also note plainly what June cannot give you — the northern lights need darkness, and there is none. Come now for the opposite reason.

One caution runs under all of it. The Reykjanes peninsula, near the airport, has erupted repeatedly since 2021, closing the town of Grindavík and, at times, the Blue Lagoon beside it. Nothing in these pages should override the day's official advisories, which the Icelandic authorities publish and update. That is the shape of travelling on the seam between two tectonic plates: the ground that makes the hot water and the steam is the same ground that occasionally rearranges the map. Check before you go, then go.

Vivienne Hartwell, Editor-in-Chief