Laufás Turf Houses

About Laufás Turf Houses

The Laufás turf houses look like a small village from the road: a row of white wooden gables pressed into grass-covered walls, with a red-roofed church standing beside them. Behind the facade it is one farmhouse, a maze of narrow corridors and connected rooms where a priest's household of 20 to 30 people once lived.

Laufás has been a church site and parsonage since the early days of Christianity in Iceland, and the National Museum records a church here as early as 1047. The farmhouse you see today was largely rebuilt in the second half of the 19th century under Reverend Björn Halldórsson, who held the parish from 1853 to 1882. Some of its timbers are thought to date from the 16th and 17th centuries.

Inside, the Laufás museum is furnished the way a prosperous farm looked around 1900, with kitchens, bedrooms and the bridal room where brides got ready for their wedding. Look up at the gables for a carved eider drake, a nod to the eider nesting grounds that once earned the farm good money. The church next door dates from 1865 and holds a carved pulpit from 1698.

Laufás sits on the eastern shore of Eyjafjörður in North Iceland, about 30 km from Akureyri on Route 83 toward Grenivík. The drive takes roughly half an hour, and an hour on site covers the farmhouse, the church and the visitor center in the old parsonage, which has a café and a local craft shop.

The farm opens only in summer. In 2026 it ran daily from 11:00 to 17:00 between May 25 and September 17, and it reopens in June 2027, with prebooked groups welcome the rest of the year. A single 2,800 ISK ticket from the Akureyri Museum covers Laufás and its other museums for the whole year, and children under 18 get in free.