Most people who come to Iceland arrive through Reykjavík and leave through it, and for many the city is a day at the start or the end, bracketing the drive around the island. We had done the island the long way, over weeks, and came to the capital late rather than first. We spent a day in it with a Brazilian family we met at the campground and joined for the day, and the day sorted itself around a single idea without our planning it: the city is where Iceland explains itself, first to the visitor who has seen nothing yet, and then in the monuments it has raised to how it began.

Perlan

We left the campground around nine and drove up Öskjuhlíð, the wooded hill on the city’s south side, to Perlan. The building is unmistakable, six cylindrical water tanks that still hold part of the city’s geothermal supply, capped with a glass dome. Inside, the tanks have been turned into a nature museum, and what it does, deliberately, is compress the whole country into a few hours under one roof. For a visitor who has just landed and seen nothing, it is a working preview of everything waiting outside the city.

The exhibits run through Iceland’s natural systems one at a time. There is an indoor ice cave, a hundred meters of tunnel built from over 350 tons of real snow packed in from the Bláfjöll mountains, kept at glacier temperature year round, with an exhibition on the glaciers and how fast they are now retreating. There is the Forces of Nature exhibit on volcanoes, earthquakes, and geothermal energy, the three processes that built and still reshape the island. There is a full-height replica of the Látrabjarg bird cliff, the largest seabird cliff in Europe, with its nesting species modeled on the rock face. There is a walk-through geological timeline showing how Iceland assembled itself along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an indoor geyser called Styrmir that fires water 25 meters up through the central atrium, and a virtual journey through the waters around the coast. The planetarium runs Áróra, a 360-degree film of the northern lights projected in 8K across the dome, which is the one thing in the building you cannot reliably see outside it in summer, when the sky never darkens enough.

For us, weeks into the island, it worked as a summary of ground we had already covered: the glaciers, the rift, the bird cliffs, the volcanic zones. For the family with us, at the start of their trip, it was the opposite, a map of what was coming. Then we took the elevator to the observation deck that rings the dome and looked out over the whole city, the mountains behind it, and the ocean beyond, and from up there we picked out where we were going next.

We came down from the hill and drove to the waterfront.

Sun Voyager

The Sun Voyager stands on the Sæbraut shore path, facing the water. It is a steel sculpture by Jón Gunnar Árnason, finished and installed in 1990, a skeletal ship of polished ribs and a raised prow that reads at first glance as a Viking longship and is not one. The artist described it as a dream boat and an ode to the sun, a vessel pointed toward the unexplored rather than a reference to the settlers. It sits low on a stone platform with the sea directly behind it and the mountains across the bay, and the steel takes the light off the water. People read the Viking ship into it anyway, because of where they are, which is its own kind of accuracy.

From the waterfront we drove up the hill to the church that stands over the old town.

Hallgrímskirkja

Hallgrímskirkja is the tallest church in Iceland and stands at the highest point of the old town, at the top of Skólavörðustígur. It was a long time being built, from 1945 into the 1980s, and it is named for Hallgrímur Pétursson, the 17th-century poet and clergyman. The front of it is the reason to look: the tower steps down on either side in tapering concrete columns meant to echo the basalt columns that form across Iceland where lava cools slowly, the same jointing we had seen at Gerðuberg and Svörtuloft and Kirkjufell. The building is a Lutheran church, not a cathedral, plain and tall inside, with an organ at the west end. The tower has an elevator and an observation deck near the top, with the city laid out below in its colored roofs.

In front of the church stands a statue of Leif Erikson, Leifur Eiríksson, the Iceland-born son of Erik the Red, regarded as the first European to reach North America, around the year 1000, five centuries before Columbus. The bronze is the work of the American sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder. It was a gift from the United States in 1930, marking the thousandth anniversary of the Althing, and its inscription reads: son of Iceland, discoverer of Vínland. One detail is worth knowing, because it reverses what everyone assumes: the statue was placed here in 1932, and the church behind it was not begun until 1945. The statue came first. The church was built behind it. Leif faces west, toward Greenland and the coast he reached.

We walked down the hill from the church toward the sea, to the low rise above the harbor.

Arnarhóll

Arnarhóll is a grassy hill above the harbor, and on top of it stands the statue of Ingólfur Arnarson, the first permanent Norse settler of Iceland, who according to tradition built his farm here around 874 and gave the place its name, Reykjavík, Smoky Bay, for the steam he saw rising from the ground. The statue shows him on the prow of a ship with a spear, looking out over the city that grew where his farm stood. It is the founding figure of everything the day had touched, standing above the ground he settled.

From the hill the view runs down to the water and Harpa, the concert hall on the harbor edge, a black glass structure whose faceted panels were designed after the basalt columns that also shaped the church we had just left. The two buildings face each other across the old town, the settler between them: the basalt of the church on the hill behind us, the basalt echoed in the glass of Harpa below, and Ingólfur on his mound in between, looking out over the bay he named. It was the right place to end, the city’s beginning set down in the middle of what it became.

Between the stops we walked the streets of the old town, Skólavörðustígur and Laugavegur, which run downhill from the church toward the harbor. These are the busiest parts of the city, lined with shops and cafés and full of people, most of them visitors like us. The pace is slower here than anywhere we had been in weeks, more crowd than road, and after so long on empty gravel tracks and single-lane fjord roads it took some adjusting to. We stopped at Sandholt, the well-known bakery on Laugavegur, for pastries, and had ice cream at another place further along the street, and let the afternoon run long before moving on.

We said goodbye to the family at the end of the day. Tomorrow we go to the National Museum to keep working through the city, and they drive out to Þingvellir, the rift valley where the Althing was founded, on their way around the island. We told them what we knew about the road ahead and wished them a good trip. We hope they see as much of this country as we have, because it has been worth every mile.