Campsites in North Iceland

Statuses are the road authority’s own, from the umferdin.is feed that also drives our road-conditions page. The feed reports stretches with a notable condition, so a road it does not mention is shown as reported open rather than assumed clear — and if the feed is unreachable this table does not appear at all. In winter the two that decide a northern trip are Route 76 over Lágheiði and Route 85 across Hólaheiði; Route 1 through Öxnadalur is the one that strands people who assumed the Ring Road never closes.

Distances are straight-line kilometresfrom the Hamrar campsite in Akureyri, computed from each site’s own coordinates. In the north the straight line is closer to the drive than it is in the fjords — but not on Tröllaskagi, where Siglufjörður is 40 km from Akureyri as the crow flies and a good deal more round the coast, and not for Grímsey, which is a ferry from Dalvík or a flight.

Rates, seasons and facilities are the operator’s own, via tjalda.is. A dash under price means no current price card, not a free site. Where the published season cannot be read as dates the verdict column says “not stated”. Facilities shown are the 7 that decide a night in a campervan.

What our own data gets wrong about the north

Every regional campsite list on the internet, ours included, starts from a region label attached to each site. We check that label against the site’s own coordinates instead of trusting it, and in the north it fails in three separate ways. Rather than quietly fix them behind the scenes, here is what we found.

Tagged north, but not in the north. Drangsnes and Tjaldstæðið Drangsnesi — both sit on Strandir at 21.4° west, which is the Westfjords by any reading. You will find them on our Westfjords list.

In the north on a map, but not in a northern trip. 5 sites inside the northern box are carried by a sibling page because that is where a traveller meets them: Stuðlagil Canyon Camping (Jökuldalur, inside Múlaþing) → East Iceland; Herðubreiðarlindir (reached only on F88) → the highland list; Drekaskáli Warden Cabin (the same place at Askja) → the highland list; Drekaskáli (Drekagil at Askja, F88 then F910) → the highland list; Skjöldólfsstaðir (Jökuldalur, 15 km up the same valley) → East Iceland.

Tagged west, but actually north. 4 sites are on this list despite carrying a West Iceland tag in our data: Kirkjuhvammur, Hvammstanga, Hvammstangi, Langafit Laugarbakka, Dæli Víðidal. All of them are in Húnaþing, north of the watershed, and would otherwise be missing from every North Iceland list including ours.

The same place, listed twice. 8 of the 64records here repeat an earlier one: our data merges tjalda.is with OpenStreetMap, and the two name the same ground differently — Húsavík and “Tjaldsvæðið á Húsavík” are one campsite. We count a pair as one place when the records are within 150 metres of each other and their names still match once the word for “campsite” is stripped off. Both records keep their row and their link, because both have a live page. The rule is deliberately strict, so a few near-certain pairs further apart than that are still counted twice.