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 two rooms out of the soft tuff rock, or when. One theory holds that they were carved by Irish monks — the Papar — who are said to have reached Iceland before the Norse settlement of 874. For centuries afterwards they were shelter on the old route between the valley and Reykjavík, used by shepherds and their flocks.
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. 1918 was one of the hardest years Iceland had known — the coldest winter on record, the volcano Katla erupting, the Spanish flu reaching the country by autumn. That same December, Iceland became a sovereign state. Through it all the couple 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 travellers on their way to Þingvellir. Three children were born in those years, and the family became the last people to live in a cave in Iceland.
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 the cave was dug out and rebuilt the way it had been — the outer wall, the window, the beds, the stove. The walls still carry names, initials and dates cut into the soft rock over more than a century. Nothing here sits behind glass. You walk in through the door they used.
