The new hotel opening up Iceland’s wild interior — in winter

“I’ve told Highland Base we are starting our crossing,” says Jon Jonsson. He points to our position, a symbol on his map screen. “Search and rescue in Reykjavík have this system. They are watching over us,” he grins. Metallic dusk has become foggy night in southern Iceland. Jon, a veteran guide, is driving a “super-jeep” Land Cruiser with 36-inch tyres, which seems bombastic until you hit snow drifts and realise nothing else will do. Visibility is around eight metres as we swerve around a barrier and glimpse its warning: “If you pass this point and problems occur . . . ”

We are bearing north into Iceland’s interior. Somewhere ahead of us are huge glaciers, dark lava fields, hundreds of miles of volcanic mountains, the largest pure wilderness in western Europe and an eccentric and idealistic hotel, Highland Base, designed to draw travellers into this obscurity.

Iceland’s recent tourism boom is well known, with foreign visitor numbers rising tenfold between 1998 and 2018 to reach 2.3mn. Most of those, however, stick to Reykjavík and the “Golden Circle” around the south-west of the country. The more adventurous set out to explore the ring road that circles the edge of the island, but only tiny numbers ever head into the emptiness at its centre. And even fewer would think of going there in winter.

We had inadvertently completed half the Golden Circle on the way to the barrier at the end of the tarmac road — passing the Haukadalur geyser, which burps a column of water into the air every seven minutes, the Gullfoss waterfall and the Kerid crater lake. Ideal bucket-list and Instagram bait, they make perfectly pleasant stops, a sort of natural theme park.

Jon senses my mystification. “Whenever there is trouble in the world, wars or political instability, people come here,” he says. What Iceland lacks — tropical diseases, scorpions, war, muggers, terrorists, Italian driving — may be as great a part of its attraction as what it has.

Add a language that no one expects you to speak (“Thank you!” is “Thakka thér fyrir!” but you won’t hear it) and this version of Iceland is a gently frictionless destination. 

But for Icelanders, their country’s treasures, beauty and power are in the interior. Hitherto, unless you hired a super-jeep and roughed it in a freezing hut, the highlands have been off limits to outsiders in winter. Highland Base aims to change that, and it is controversial.

“People say that if we improve this road then the masses will come,” Jon says, navigating frozen bends. Winter has arrived early tonight, laying thick snow in drifts across the road. Warmer winds from the south carry moisture from the Atlantic to meet the glacier-cooled air of the interior and Arctic cold, forming this swirling fog.

“Before they started building the hotel you would never do this — at night in these conditions,” Jon says. He is battling us along what was once a drover’s track linking Iceland’s north-west and southern coasts, a route that dates back to the Norse colonisation of Iceland in the ninth century. It’s now an unpaved road marked by reflecting poles, dodging from side to side in the fog.

For centuries, violent terrain and weather kept both populace and visitors to the edges of the country, leaving the highlands to shepherds and outlaws. In 1780, two brothers, two guides and their livestock vanished while attempting the crossing. In 1845, a sorcerer predicted the brothers’ remains would be discovered under a lava field, and they were, but the reputation of the region, held to be the territory of trolls and spirits ever since the time of settlement, was sealed.

Ice-gloop whomps across the windscreen in green sheets as we plunge through troughs of slush. A little over three hours since leaving Reykjavík, and 90 minutes from the start of the gravel track, lights appear below us, yellow-orange lamps bright in the darkness. Highland Base has an off-world feel as the gale flings us into the bar-dining room. Huge windows fend off the night. A tunnel leads to the accommodation block, allowing access to breakfast in any weather.

Design throughout is Nordic post-apocalypse chic for the one per cent: comfy minimalism framed in heavy cross-laminated timber and low lighting suggest a hygge space station. There are 28 bedrooms, including suites that offer hot tubs on sturdy balconies. Up to your neck in geothermal hot water, the snow whipping around your ears, it feels as though you have found the bellybutton of Iceland, the middle of nowhere’s nowhere. At dinner, grinning Gen-Z waitresses say “Amazing!” when you order mushroom soup followed by roast cauliflower, and admit that living in the hotel during its soft opening reminds them of The Shining. “We’ve all talked about it. We try not to think about it!” says one. Gales hush you to sleep. 

Morning brings a storm and the man responsible for setting up Highland Base, Magnús Orri Schram. “I was a football commentator,” he says, “then a politician. When I became an entrepreneur, I wanted to do something that would have meaning, not just money.”

Magnús was an MP and chair of the Social Democratic Alliance, which came to power in the wake of Iceland’s 2008 banking crisis. The coalition oversaw the jailing of executives involved in the collapse of the country’s largest banks and attempted to overhaul the fishing quotas that continue to gift corporations and elites enormous profits, to the detriment, the Social Democrats argue, of Iceland’s people.

Compared with trying to reform the entire country, constructing a hotel in the wilderness must have seemed straightforward, especially as the cash is covered. Highland Base is an offshoot of Blue Lagoon, the spa near Reykjavík that uses water from a geothermal power plant and has grown into a company with a £370mn capital value, poised to list on Nasdaq Iceland.

But the weather and the mountains, which look murderous today, looming masses streaked with snow and hosed by blowing sleet, had other ideas. Costs have risen significantly, with the final budget reaching about $20mn.

Everything from the salt spoons to the cement mixer Magnús is praying for has to make it along the rough road to this valley in Kerlingarfjöll — “old lady mountains” — a circular range of high peaks between the Hofsjökull and Langjökull ice caps. The hotel opened to its first guests in July. Thanks to the efforts of workers in luminous snow suits, a trio of outdoor geothermal hotpots, the “Highland Base Baths”, will be ready by spring, as long as the cement arrives. “I have no worries about people who say there should be no hotel in the highlands,” Magnús says. “I will change their minds!”

He explains that this valley is special to Icelanders. “In the 1930s there was a mountaineering school here. The first cabin was built in 1937, for hiking tours, then in the ’60s there was the ski school — summer skiing on the glaciers.”

Retreating snow fields did away with that, leaving a scatter of A-frame huts and the old accommodation building, which have been incorporated into Magnús’s vision. As well as the main hotel building and its 80-seat restaurant, there are now six private lodges (sleeping two to four), seven huts (with space for between two and 15 guests, who must bring their own sleeping bags) and a summer-only campsite. “We’re making a mountain village,” Magnús says. “We want the atmosphere of all being together in the highlands, eating the same food in the same place.”

Led by Helga María Heidarsdóttir, we pile into another super-jeep. A glaciologist and the president of the Association of Icelandic Mountain Guides, Helga loves howling weather. “Let’s have an adventure!” she cries, issuing crampons. She gestures to a rearing greyscale mass. “On that mountain, Asgardhsfjall, they measured Iceland’s highest wind speed, 70 metres per second [252kph]. Until the 1930s, most of these peaks were unnamed.”

We curve up along ridges past bright green moss into the mountains. We stop and try to take it all in. The contours and colours illustrate Helga’s lecture on the formation of this desolation. She describes subglacial volcanoes blasting up into ice sheets, magma and steam fusing into palagonite outcrops and red rhyolite peaks. Ten thousand years ago, a bursting meltwater lake slashed the canyon below us through basalt and black sandstone ridges. “I love the energy of places where you can feel the internal and the external forces,” Helga says. We drive on, stopping half an hour from the hotel to begin our trek into the Hveradalir geopark, where steam swirls sideways in a sleet wind. “The rhyolite is very sticky, it clogs your crampons. Follow my steps and dig your heels into the snow.”

We descend a knuckle of Hveradalir’s clutched ridges into a volcanic otherwhere, iron-red, manganese-white and yellow. Hot tributaries, squeezing through rhyolite tumps, run into an icy current. Stitched lines of fumaroles spit sulphurous steam, hissing like devils’ kettles. “They are 150 degrees,” Helga says. “About a kilometre down, meltwater is meeting hot rock — the magma chamber is 10 kilometres below us.”

She shows us little beaches scattered with shining obsidian. Magnús allows me to take a tiny piece, which Helga says will fend off evil spirits. At the top of a ridge, we stand on snow above two fissure lines of fumaroles. “We call this Hell!” Helga laughs. “Would you like a drink?” In sulphur steam we applaud as she produces hot chocolate from her rucksack. Hveradalir feels like God’s building site: we end the day in a thermal pool a short walk up the canyon from the hotel, craned over by black ridges and basalt crags like curious dinosaurs, in hot water made silky by thermophilic algae. 

“Storm walk!” Helga announces the following afternoon, the morning having been eaten by a blizzard, snow hosing in mesmerising horizontals down the canyon. From the palagonite crown of Asgardhsfjall, leaning against a 60kph wind, the full astonishing panorama of this place appears. To the south, the Langjökull ice cap looks like a hard cloud of fallen sky, glowing eerie green. North and west, the Jokulfall river, winding out of the Hofsjökull glacier, crosses plains of stone and pumice ash. Behind us, Kerlingarfjöll is fulminating another storm. “Wind up to 20 metres a second is fun, after 25 it’s dangerous,” Helga shouts. “Down!”

As Jon prepares the super-jeep for our extraction the next morning, Helga explains to a Dutch family that the storms have closed the geopark for the time being. “In the mountains the weather decides!” she says, gaily. In the following days, though, it takes pity on Highland Base — supported by snow ploughs, Magnús’s cement mixer arrives. The baths will open. Lucky travellers will come here, and the luckiest will see the aurora borealis light the freezing nights of this elemental place.

It seems certain that Highland Base will change the interior, allowing small parties of winter visitors to be humbled and amazed, as I was. When I reached home, I asked a young writer of the TikTok generation why she wanted to go to Iceland. “For the vibes!” she cried. Helga was right about the combined energies of the erupting earth below and the rampaging storms above. Kerlingarfjöll thrums with their powers. Perhaps the forces the Norse settlers called trolls and spirits, our age calls vibes. They are mighty and actual in Iceland’s interior, and however many travellers it attracts, Highland Base seems unlikely to diminish them.