For 2 km we’ve seen nothing but fog, so thick that the wooden stakes rammed into the field of scree are barely visible. Then, on a slope, the silhouettes of a pair of hikers looking downward appear.
But even from up here, the eruption on Fagradalsfjall can’t be seen yet. Iceland’s newest, still nameless volcano, opened up in March on the Reykjanes Peninsula at the southwest tip of the country. Then the fog clears and reveals a lunar landscape, rugged, in gray and black; in some places pale yellow sulfur coagulates; here and there smoke rises. The field is crisscrossed by fiery orange rivulets of lava that flow along, sometimes swift, sometimes slow and viscous. At one point a deep rumbling can be heard in the distance, but on this foggy summer day, the volcano refuses to show itself.
The primordial forces released by volcanoes are as fascinating as they are threatening — just think of the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, which brought air traffic in the northern hemisphere to a standstill — and in Iceland the southern coastal road may soon also fall victim to lava flows. But, for Icelandic tourism, the eruption came at just the right time. After a decade of breathtaking growth, the COVID-19 crisis has reduced it drastically: In 2019 nearly 2 million tourists landed at Keflavik International Airport. In the COVID year of 2020 there were a mere 478,000.
Then, in mid-March, Iceland began to open itself gradually to fully vaccinated people. This May, nearly 13 times as many people travelled to Iceland, compared to the admittedly very low numbers in May 2020. For the coming months, the Icelandic Tourist Board (ITB) is expecting stable growth. Starting in autumn, pre-pandemic levels should be reached: “For this year we expect a total of about 900,000 visitors. That’s almost half as many as in 2019,” Snorri Valsson from the ITB told DW. “In 2022 there could again be almost two million. So we expect a swift recovery.” It could, however, be a problem that many workers from abroad who could no longer afford the cost of living here after they lost their jobs in the tourist industry because of COVID-19 have left Iceland. The coronavirus itself has largely spared the country, with its population of 360,000: According to Our World in Data, 6,555 infections and 29 deaths have been registered, and since May no one else has become infected.
Iceland wants to make sure things remain that way. Citizens of the European Economic Area (EEA) can enter the country if they present a negative PCR test that is no more than 72 hours old. Those who have recovered from the disease or been vaccinated have to present valid proof, for instance that provided by the digital COVID certificate launched by the EU. That sounds reckless in light of the rapidly spreading delta variant — but according to Valsson, like every pandemic decision in Iceland, it is science-based: “Our society is protected. Even if in individual cases the delta variant were to be accidentally introduced, it wouldn’t trigger a large outbreak in Iceland.” By the first weekend in July, 77% of the population had received a first vaccination, and a good 65% were already fully vaccinated.
That leads to the kind of post-pandemic feeling that tourists can enjoy in only a few places on earth: Masks must be worn on rare occasions, for instance at a performance in the impressive Harpa concert hall on the waterfront of the capital, Reykjavik. In Iceland you can sit at the last free table in an otherwise-full restaurant without feeling uneasy. Only hand-sanitiser dispensers and in a few places the request to enter your contact details are faint reminders of the coronavirus.
