Iceland Turf Houses: Grass-Covered Homes, History and Famous Sites

It’s easy to drive past them. A low green ridge beside the road, six gables poking out of a grassy bank, the whole thing reading as landscape rather than architecture – which is the point. For a thousand years this was simply how Icelanders lived, and the handful of farms that survive are among the most quietly extraordinary things on the island. If you’re weighing up all inclusive travel deals for somewhere warm instead, this is the argument for going north. 

Whether you want to understand how Iceland turf houses were actually built, see the famous farms for yourself, or get a feel for traditional Icelandic architecture beyond the usual waterfall circuit, these sites reward a short detour better than almost anything else on the Ring Road. Learn to spot them and the country starts reading differently from your very first drive. 

How a turf house was actually built

Calling them grass houses Iceland style undersells the engineering. The structure is timber; the turf is the envelope, cut from nearby marshland in distinct shapes – strengur, torfa, klömbruhnaus and snidda – and stacked into walls thick enough to hold heat through an Arctic winter, often with stone worked in. The catch is that turf is alive: the plant roots binding it eventually rot, so walls have to be rebuilt periodically. South-facing walls might last 20 to 25 years, north-facing ones 50 to 70. What makes Icelandic turf houses unusual in a European context is who lived in them. Elsewhere, turf meant poverty; here, everyone built this way, and what signaled wealth was the timber – scarce enough that it came from driftwood or trade. 

Glaumbær, the one everyone photographs

If you only see one, make it Glaumbær in Skagafjörður, a short turn off the Ring Road in the north. Thirteen turf buildings sit linked together behind a row of six front-facing gables, and the Glaumbaer turf house complex was lived in until 1947 – within living memory – before the National Museum took it on and the Skagafjörður Folk Museum opened there in 1952. Inside, the passage runs room to room like a burrow: a kitchen black with smoke, pantries, a long baðstofa where the household slept, ate and spun wool under one low roof. Two timber houses were moved here later, including Áshús from the 1880s, and the contrast between them and the turf is the real lesson of the visit. 

The other farms worth the detour

Fourteen turf sites sit together on Iceland’s UNESCO tentative list, submitted in 2011, and several are easy additions to a route. Keldur, in Rangárvellir on the south coast, traces back to the late 12th century and is reckoned the oldest surviving farmhouse in the country – complete with an underground passage thought to date from the 12th or 13th century. Laufás in Eyjafjörður and Bustarfell in Vopnafjörður are northern equivalents, while Árbær, an open-air museum inside Reykjavík, is the easy one if you never leave the capital. Hofskirkja in Öræfi deserves a stop of its own: built in 1883–85 and the last church in Iceland raised in the old turf style, its graveyard a field of grassy mounds. Winter adds something else entirely, since these are rural, dark-sky places where chasing the northern lights in Iceland and seeing a turf farm can be the same evening. 

Turf building across the North Atlantic

Iceland isn’t alone in this. The Faroe Islands turf houses tradition runs back to the Norse settlement too, and it never really stopped – Kirkjubøur has the densest cluster, Saksun’s Dúvugarðar farm looks over a tidal lagoon, and even the government offices on the Tinganes peninsula in Tórshavn wear grass roofs. Norway has its own version. What differs is scale and ambition: Faroese turf is mostly roofing, while the Icelandic tradition wrapped entire linked farmsteads in it. Travelers who come across grassland houses in Scotland or Scandinavia are seeing cousins of the same idea, shaped by the same shortage of timber and surplus of weather. 

Working them into a real route

None of these are day trips from Reykjavík on their own; they work as punctuation. Glaumbær and Víðimýrarkirkja sit minutes apart in Skagafjörður, so the north coast drive between Akureyri and the Westfjords takes them both in. Keldur and Hofskirkja fall naturally into a south coast run toward Vatnajökull. Check seasonal hours before committing – many close or go appointment-only outside summer, even when the grounds stay walkable – and allow an hour at the big farms, because the interiors are the point. If the drive sounds like more than you want to organize, winter vacation packages that bundle flights, car and hotels take the logistics off your hands. 

Why the turf farms stay with you

Waterfalls and glaciers are what people photograph in Iceland; the turf houses are what they end up talking about. There’s something disarming about a building engineered to decay and be rebuilt, generation after generation, by people with almost no wood and no stone worth the name. Travelodeal can shape Iceland travel packages around a route that includes them – a night in the north, a slow afternoon in Skagafjörður, and enough time to sit in a smoky kitchen that someone’s grandmother actually cooked in. 

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