The best hot springs and geothermal pools in Iceland

What’s changed, as tourism has boomed, is the arrival of a new breed of privately owned, architect-designed pools that resemble boutique hotel spas, including Geosea, which opened in 2018 and is built almost invisibly into the landscape north of little Húsavík, a fishing town known for whale- watching and Will Ferrell’s tongue-in-cheek Eurovision movie. The pool was masterminded by Basalt Architects, a Reykjavík firm co-founded by the no-nonsense Sigríður Sigþórsdóttir, who led the original design of the Retreat at Blue Lagoon Iceland in 2018. Making an attraction from the byproduct of a nearby geothermal power station was dismissed as outlandish at the time, but it became a blueprint for a type of design defined by clean-lined concrete and sensitivity to the landscape.

Many of Basalt’s other designs are built into hillsides with grass roofs, inspired by traditional Icelandic turf houses, including the Hofsós infinity pool on North Iceland’s Troll Peninsula and the newer Vök Baths, jutting out onto the Urriðavatn lake in the less-explored east. While the Blue Lagoon on the southern Reykjanes Peninsula has always been a tourist attraction, many of these pools are used primarily by Icelanders, who until recently made do with publicly funded local pools defined by rickety flumes rather than geometric timber.

Health is a key appeal. A few years ago, in the sunken concrete hot bath at the man-made Nauthólsvík Geothermal Beach in Reykjavík, I sat next to Haukur Bergsteinsson, an 85-year-old drinking tea after his daily 300-metre swim across the bay in a lime-green swim cap. That had been his 1,600th swim there – always following the exercise with a hot soak. Haukur had taken up swimming after a cancer diagnosis, and swore that his chilly dips had cured him. “As I slowly built up the distance I swam across the bay, I felt my symptoms disappear,” he told me. “It felt like I was being reborn. Every day, after the cold, I sit in the hot bath and I feel so fresh and vital.”

This trip, from Reykjavík to Húsavík, is the first time I consciously embrace the cold as well as the heat – inspired partly by a Viking sauna ritual at Eleven Deplar Farm lodge in the far north, involving 15-minute sessions in a 100-degree sauna followed by icy minute-long dips in a two-degree plunge pool. For all the electric numbing buzz of the cold – curiously close to the feeling of burning – I manage to control my breathing and lean into the mind-clearing discipline of it. At every new venue, I try to spend a minute in the cold pool, which seems to rearrange my brain and body cells and attune me to the natural world beyond the baths. Never mind the immunity-boosting science espoused by Dutch motivational speaker Wim Hof, I just feel cleaner and more embodied.

The pools are also about straightforward pleasure. On a Saturday evening we find ourselves at the Forest Lagoon, another Basalt creation which opened last spring in the woods across the water from Akureyri, Iceland’s adventure-oriented northern second city. As the sky darkens and the occasional plane rumbles into tiny Akureyri airport on the other side of the Eyjafjörður, there is a general sense of merriment in the soft-lit pool, overlooked by wood-glass cuboid modernist structures. In the steam and near-celestial light, families are slowly replaced by couples and groups of friends, chatting and drinking wine.

On our last night in Reykjavík, the hedonism is dialled up at the Sky Lagoon, a splashy new competitor to the Blue Lagoon, which seems to appear from nowhere on the edge of an industrial park to the south of the city. Designed by Reykjavík-based Tark Architects and opened in 2021, it is more shamelessly futuristic than Basalt’s unobtrusive designs. We leave the crisp changing rooms, soundtracked by low Nils Frahm- style beats, for a cold, dark evening and a waterworld enveloped by looming hunks of volcanic rock. Middle Earth waterways lead to a dramatic 75-metre infinity edge lookout, where the twinkle of semi-industrial Reykjavík cedes to sea, with the recently erupted Fagradalsfjall volcano in the distance. The Seven-Step Ritual – an icy plunge, a warm bathe, sauna, cold mist shower and exfoliating scrub followed by a steam room – happens in a turf-covered space, like a Hobbit house from the 2040s, with nothing but dark sea visible from the picture-window sauna. We are deposited back into the main pool with softer skin, to float around black rocks and submerge into the watery silence, watching the steam dissipate and become one with the cold night sky.

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