Vestrahorn

Vestrahorn is one of those mountains that seem designed for the shoreline in front of them. On the Stokksnes peninsula in south-east Iceland, a jagged wall of dark peaks about 454 metres high rises almost straight from a plain of black sand, and the dunes at its foot are tufted with pale grass. When the tide leaves a film of water on the beach, the serrated ridgeline is mirrored in it, and on a clear winter day the snow catches in the gullies while the sand stays black. The spiky silhouette has earned the nickname "Batman Mountain", and few places in Iceland are photographed as often.

The drama is geological. Most Icelandic mountains are built of basalt, but Vestrahorn is one of the few made largely of gabbro, a coarse-grained rock that cooled slowly deep underground, together with granophyre. These intrusions date back about 6.6 million years and were pushed into older basalt; erosion has since stripped the softer cover away and carved the harder rock into the sharp pinnacles visible today. Eastwards the ridge continues towards the sea as Brunnhorn, whose own crest forms a second, lower row of teeth.

The mountain also has a place in the earliest history of Iceland. According to the medieval account of the settlement, Vestrahorn marked the boundary between the land claims of two of the first settlers, Þorsteinn leggur and Hrollaugur Rögnvaldsson, and the area is tied to Horn, one of the early settlement farms. In March 1873 several French fishing schooners were driven ashore here in a storm. During the Second World War the peninsula held a British army post, and a radar station still stands at the tip of the headland. Seals sometimes haul out on the sand, though their presence is never guaranteed. The image of the mountain appeared on an Icelandic postage stamp in 1991.

Getting there

Vestrahorn stands about 10 km east of Höfn í Hornafirði, roughly a ten-minute drive away. Hornafjörður Airport (HFN), with domestic flights, is about 14 km away; the larger regional town of Akureyri lies over 200 km away in the north. From Höfn the Ring Road (Route 1) leads east to a signed turn-off towards Stokksnes, and a side road leads past the Viking Café to the beach and dunes; access is across private land. Driving from Reykjavík along the south coast takes most of a day.