Welcome to Iceland Guest - Your Online Travel Guide.

Iceland Guest is an information website for your travel to Iceland. On this site you can get all the tourist information you need for your vacation in Iceland. We hope that you will find this online travel guide useful in planning your holidays in Iceland.

About Iceland
Iceland is a refreshingly unconventional travel destination. The Icelandic nature is unspoilt, exotic and mystical with its spouting geysers, active volcanoes, tumbling waterfalls, towering mountains, vast lava plains and magical lakes. Iceland’s fjords, glaciers and highland plains present visitors with some of the most beautiful and enchanting places they will ever see, as well as a rare feeling of utter tranquillity.

For travelers on a quest for action, Iceland’s pristine nature offers great potential for outdoor activities such as snowmobiling, horse riding, cave exploring, hiking, swimming, skiing, river rafting, kayaking and mountain safaris on modified four-wheel drives, to name but a few. Iceland supports a surprisingly diverse Nordic flora and fauna and is an ideal place for ornithology enthusiasts, while also offering some of the world’s best whale watching destinations.

About Reykjavik
Reykjavík sometimes feels like a cosmopolitan capital and a tiny seaside village - all wrapped up in one. But Reykjavík has the best of both worlds; the qualities of a modern, forward-looking society complemented by a close connection to Iceland‚s beautiful and unspoilt nature.

Reykjavík’s legendary nightlife is bolstered by plentiful cultural and social happenings in addition to an abundance of first-class restaurants. The size of Reykjavik city centre is also limited enough to allow for easy navigation by foot. Reykjavík has been described as a young and daring city that is characterized by strong contrasts. Conveniently small, clean and safe, it is more or less free from the major problems that haunt many other capitals. Big city events are frequent, the winter lights festival finished recently with thousands of participants and more tourist at this time of the year than we are used to.

Highlights and Places in Iceland

Kópavogur - Old but Modern Town.

Kópavogur

Town of Kopavogur

Old but modern town.

Kópavogur (pop. 26,000) is the second largest community in Iceland after Reykjavík, and the fastest-growing one too. An independent township, it lies in the geographical centre of the Greater Reykjavík Area, only ten minutes drive from downtown Reykjavík.

Although Kópavogur was an old local assembly site and has been the scene of historical events since the settlement of Iceland, it was a farmland until the 1930s. By 1948 it had become a parish of 900 people, and when Kópavogur was granted municipal status in 1955 its population was almost 4,000. The town has grown steadily and rapidly ever since but is not merely a residential area, because more than one thousand companies operate there today, mainly in services and light industry, and massive development is still going on.

The modern dome of Kópavogur Church - the town's emblem - dominates the skyline to the south of Reykjavík. On the same hilltop are Kópavogur Art Museum (Gerðarsafn) an elegant, spacious museum built in 1985 to house the works of modern sculpture pioneer and glass artist Gerður Helgadóttir, who also made the stained glass windows for the church. Another collection features works by painter/sculptor Magnús Árnason and his English-born wife Barbara, an illustrator and graphics artist. Selected exhibitions from these collections are arranged at intervals, but the museum's main activity is exhibitions by modern Icelandic artists, held approximately every month.

Also on the site is the new complex forming Kópavogur Cultural Centre. It houses Iceland's first and only custom-built concert hall, Salurinn, Kópavogur Concert Hall, which opened in 1999. Regular concerts and recitals are held at the centre, featuring both celebrated Icelandic performers and visiting international musicians.

One of Iceland's finest collections of molluscs and crustaceans is on display at the Natural Science Centre in Kópavogur town centre, just across the bridge. The centre also houses impressive collections of rocks and birds, and includes four tanks with live fish and marine life. A new open-air geothermally heated swimming pool, the largest in Iceland, is among the many excellent sports and leisure facilities in Kópavogur, which also boasts the biggest indoor tennis court in the country.

Kópavogur old but modern town Kópavogur host the Icelandic Fisheries Exhibition, a prestigious international event held every three years. IFE is held in the combined conference, exhibition an sports centre Fifan on the town's south side, a popular venue for large-scale trade fairs. In the same area of Kópavogur a massive shopping area has been developed around Smaralind, the largest shopping mall in Iceland, measuring 70.000 m2. Not all of Kópavogur is modern urban landscape, however. The old western part of the town (Kársnes) includes a small harbour and is a pleasant place for strolling along the shore and bird watching. And paths for pleasant walks lie through the "green belt" on either side of town, extending all the way to Lake Elliðavatn on the border of Reykjavík's Heiðmörk nature reserve.

Kópavogur
The Town Hall
Fannborg 2
200 Kópavogur
Iceland
Tel. 570 1500
Fax. 570 1501
Website: www.kopavogur.is