Our story
They lived here because they had to
There was no farmland to be had in the valley. So a newly married couple moved into a cave beside the road, and turned it into a working farm.
No one knows who cut these rooms out of the rock, or when. One theory holds that they were here before Iceland was settled. For centuries afterwards they were shelter on the old route between the valley and Reykjavík — big enough, people said, to hold four or five hundred sheep.
In 1910 Indriði Guðmundsson and Guðrún Kolbeinsdóttir moved in. He was twenty-two, she was seventeen, and they had just married. They named the place Reyðarmúli, kept animals, and sold coffee to travellers passing on the road. They lasted a year.
Seven years later, in the spring of 1918, Jón Þorvarðarson and Vigdís Helgadóttir arrived and stayed four hard winters. They kept sheep, horses and a cow. Vigdís grew potatoes on the sunny southern slope. Jón hunted ptarmigan and carried them to Reykjavík to sell. Between them they served skyr, cream and cakes to people on their way to Þingvellir. Three children came along in those years, two of them born inside the cave.
In 1921 King Kristján X rode through on his journey across Iceland and stopped, as was the custom, on the Laugarvatn plains. Vigdís carried out skyr and cream and served the king from her kitchen in the hillside.
The family bought a farm of their own and left. The caves stood empty for decades and the floor rose year by year with drifting soil. In 2017 they were dug out and rebuilt the way they had been — the outer wall, the window, the beds, the stove. Nothing here sits behind glass. You walk in through the door they used.
