Campsites in the Westfjords

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. Read a Westfjords closure differently from one anywhere else: there is usually no parallel road, so the detour is measured in hours, and long sections of both these roads are still gravel.

Distances are straight-line kilometresfrom the Tungudalur campsite at Ísafjörður, computed from each site’s own coordinates. Nowhere in Iceland is the straight line a worse guide to the drive than here: Bíldudalur is 45 km from Ísafjörður as the crow flies and about three times that by road, because the road follows every fjord and climbs every heath between them. Treat the column as an ordering, not a journey time.

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.

The 10 campsites with no road to them

Every one of these is inside the Hornstrandir Nature Reserve, which has no road network at all. The last road on the west side stops at Unaðsdalur on Snæfjallaströnd; on the east side it stops at Norðurfjörður. Beyond that you arrive by scheduled boat from Ísafjörður, Bolungarvík or Norðurfjörður — summer only, weather permitting — or you walk in over a heath carrying everything you need. There are no shops, no fuel and, at most of them, no facilities beyond a place to pitch.

They are listed separately because every other Westfjords campsite list we could find mixes them in with the town sites, which is how someone in a campervan ends up planning a night at a place they physically cannot reach.

The distance column is the straight line from Ísafjörður, which for once is close to honest — a boat crosses Ísafjarðardjúp more or less directly. It is still not a journey time: sailings run a few days a week in high summer and stop entirely outside it.

What our own data gets wrong about the Westfjords

We check every site’s region label against its own coordinates rather than trusting it. In the Westfjords the label is right about everything it claims — all 43 records tagged westfjords really are in the Westfjords, which no other region in our data manages. What it gets wrong is what it leaves out.

7 sites here are tagged as somewhere else. Tjaldsvæðið á Skörðum (Barðaströnd in Vesturbyggð — tagged West in our data); Melanes, Rauðasandi (Rauðasandur in Vesturbyggð — tagged West in our data); Krákuvör (Reykhólahreppur — tagged West in our data); Tjaldstæðið á Reykhólum (Reykhólar — tagged West in our data); Miðjanes (Reykhólahreppur — tagged West in our data); Drangsnes (Strandir — tagged North in our data); Tjaldstæðið Drangsnesi (Strandir — tagged North in our data). Without the coordinate check every one of them would be missing from this list — and Drangsnes, with its hot tubs on the shore, is one of the better-known campsites on Strandir.

One boundary we left alone. Borðeyri and Sæberg sit on the west shore of Hrútafjörður, which is historically Strandir and therefore arguably the Westfjords. Our West Iceland page already publishes them, and a site belongs on one list, so that is where they stay. The Strandir sites here start at Drangsnes.

The same place, listed twice. 8 of the 50records repeat an earlier one — our data merges tjalda.is with OpenStreetMap, and the two name the same ground differently, so Flateyri is also “Tjaldsvæði Flateyrar”. 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 keep their row and their link, because both have a live page.