Whales of Iceland

This guide to Whales of Iceland in Reykjavik opens in August 2014, when dockworkers unloaded the fiberglass pieces of a twenty-five-meter blue whale, built to order in China and shipped in through the city's harbor. It follows the entrepreneur behind the project, Hordur Bender, and his gamble that visitors would pay to see life-size replicas of real whales at a time when Iceland's commercial whaling was scaring tourists away. Twenty-three species now hang from the ceiling of a converted net-repair shed, each one hand-painted to match the scars and markings of a whale biologists had actually photographed at sea. Look up at the sperm whale overhead before you move on.