Jules Verne's entrance
The crater is the gateway of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864.
Original uploader was HansOosting at nl.wikipedia — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Markus Trienke — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Sergei Gussev — CC BY 2.0 · Sergei Gussev — CC BY 2.0
A national park covering the western tip of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, centred on the Snæfellsjökull volcano with its ice cap, and the only national park in Iceland that reaches the sea. The volcano is internationally known for a literary reason: in Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, published in 1864, the crater of Snæfellsjökull is the entrance through which the characters descend into the earth. The mountain is visible from Reykjavik across the bay on clear days, a hundred and twenty kilometres away. What makes the park useful to a visitor is the variety within a small area: lava fields, black sand beaches, sea stacks, nesting cliffs, lava caves and small fishing villages, all on a single circular road that can be driven in a day from Reykjavik. That is why the area is called Iceland in miniature locally: you find most of the country's landforms without driving the whole Ring Road. Practical points: entry is free and some car parks charge. Climbing to the ice cap requires a guide. The weather on the western tip is changeable and constantly windy.
The crater is the gateway of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864.
Lava, black beaches, sea stacks and caves in one small area.
The mountain is seen from Reykjavik across the bay, 120 km away.
Western tip of the Snæfellsnes peninsula
Arnarstapi and Hellnar with the short coastal path between them among sea stacks, the black beach at Djúpalónssandur with its shipwreck remains, the isolated black church at Búðir, the Rauðfeldsgjá cleft, and Kirkjufell mountain near Grundarfjörður. A full day covers all of it if you leave Reykjavik early.
The novel is entirely fiction, but Verne chose Snæfellsjökull specifically because it was known in the nineteenth century as a remote and mysterious volcano at the edge of the known world. The choice made the mountain internationally famous a century before Iceland became a tourist destination. There is, of course, no passage to the centre of the earth.
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