Exploring Vestmannaeyjar - Island Where Half a Town Got Buried Under Lava in 1973

Vestmannaeyjar is not one island but a collection of them and these belong under Iceland, in the southern part of the country. Yes, Iceland has islands and actually quite many of them. We visited the biggest island that is named Heimaey where also a town with about 4000 people is located. To get there you need to take a ferry from the mainland. Here you can see some cliffs in the harbor area. I took these shots when we arrived at the Heimaey island.

There are 10 islands that belong under Vestmannaeyjar but Heimaey is the only one you can visit. All the other islands are visited only for scientific purposes. Heimaey is about 4km wide and 6 km long, pretty small island really.

We wanted to visit this island in 2021 too but the ferry trip was canceled due to a storm so im glad we got to go this time.

We left our car at the port on the mainland and rented electric scooters to get around on the island. The first place we went was a museum of the eruption disaster and local islands formation history. They have excavated one house that was buried under lava in 1973 and built a museum around it.

For me who is extremely interested in volcanoes and geology, it was extremely interesting. Here you can see a house half-buried under lava.

Next up, our plan was to hike up the 200m high eruption crater that erupted and produced a disaster for this community.
The hike was not too hard but some sections are steep and have loose gravel. The crater itself is called Heldfell.

The higher we hiked, the more apparent it got how much lava this eruption spewed out.

The two smaller islands back there are Elliðaey on the left and Bjarnarey on the right.

Here is another volcano named Helgafell, it's about 6000 years old and is situated right next to Heldfell we were hiking. We wanted to hike Helgafell too but ended up being short of time later so we didnt.

Here you can spot some people on the crater rim. This shows a bit of perspective on how large this crater is.

Didnt take too long before we were up there too.

From up there we got to see some great views all over the Heimaey island. It is also very apparent where the lava flowed in the year of 1973. It's clear as day how the lava wall moved over parts of the town.

Me sitting on the rock formations on the crater rim.

View to the south.

We took another way down along the lava flow.

Nothing describes the destruction of this eruption better than this photo below. Here you can see the photo before the eruption and the view after the eruption so you can see how much the landscape changed. I don't remember the exact number but hundreds of homes were buried under lava.

Note how much you can see water in the old photo and now.

It was surreal to think that there are ruins of the homes about 10-15 meters below our feet. Here is a memorial of one of the houses that was exactly below this spot. We saw at least 5 of these memorials.

We descended into the town. Here you can see the wall of lava that approached in 1973 and the houses right next to it were barely saved.

I will add a couple of photos here too from the town itself. Brothers Brewery was a great place to sit down and have a couple of beers. A great choice of different kinds of draft beers.

A rainbow street.

We did more hikes and saw some places around this island but these will be the subjects of other posts, stay tuned!