South Coast · With kids

Three museums on one site: turf farmhouses you can walk into, a folk collection of over 18,000 objects, and a hall of old buses, boats and machines. Open 362 days a year, closed only 24–25 December and 1 January. Adults 3,000 ISK, 12–17s 1,600, under-12s free, family ticket 6,750.

Mánabraut 3: two outdoor pools — the main one 16.7 m at 28–29°C and a children's pool at 37–38°C — plus a hot tub, a cold tub and a sauna. Weekdays 08:30–20:00, weekends 12:00–18:00, everyone out fifteen minutes before closing. Adults 1,500 ISK, children 550.

A free geological exhibition in the village explaining the volcano under Mýrdalsjökull that the whole district is arranged around. Indoors, short, and the obvious move when the weather shuts the coast down, which it does often.

The black beach and the Reynisdrangar stacks below Vík. Waves here run far up the sand without warning and people have been killed; keep children well back from the water line, never turn your back on the sea, and treat this as somewhere to look at rather than play on.

The Herjólfur ferry crosses from Landeyjahöfn to Heimaey — a hybrid ship carrying 540 passengers and around 75 vehicles, up to seven sailings a day. Heimaey has about 4,300 people, a working harbour, puffins in season and the Eldheimar museum about the 1973 eruption.