Sundhöllin

This guide to Sundhöllin opens with the saga-age settler Ingólfur Arnarson, who around the year 870 threw his ship's carved high seat posts into the sea and vowed to build wherever they washed ashore, giving Reykjavik its name from the steam his slaves found rising along this bay. It follows that same geothermal water into 1937, when the pool became one of the city's first buildings to run on springs piped three kilometers from Laugardalur, at a time when most homes had no bathroom at all. Architect Guðjón Samúelsson had drawn the plans years earlier, long before hard economic times let the project finally go ahead. Stand at the pool's edge and feel the warmth rising from underfoot.