Skógar Museum

About Skógar Museum

Skógar Museum sits a minute's drive from Skógafoss, and it's the best reason to linger in Skógar after you've seen the falls. Known in Icelandic as Skógasafn, it holds more than 15,000 objects from the farms and fishing families of the South Coast, spread across three museums and a cluster of historic buildings.

The collection started with one man. Þórður Tómasson founded the museum in 1949 in the local school and kept collecting and curating until he retired in 2013, at the age of 92. In the folk museum, the centerpiece is Pétursey, an eight-oared fishing boat built in 1855 and rowed off the harbor-less sand beaches here until 1946.

Outside, the open-air museum is the part to save time for. You can walk through a turf farmhouse with a communal sleeping room (baðstofa), an open-hearth kitchen and a cattle shed, then climb past a country schoolhouse, a church and a wooden house built in 1898. Every building was moved here from the surrounding districts and rebuilt on site.

The Technical Museum, opened in 2002, covers transport and communication in Iceland, from working horses and river ferries to telephones and the work of rescue teams. Freya Café inside serves breakfast and lunch, and the museum shop shares the hall.

The Skógar Museum is open daily from 9:00 to 18:00 from June to August and from 10:00 to 17:00 the rest of the year, closing only on December 24, 25 and January 1. Tickets cost 3,000 ISK for adults, 2,000 ISK for students and seniors and 1,600 ISK for teenagers aged 12 to 17, and children under 12 get in free. Plan on 90 minutes to two hours, and expect about a two-hour drive from Reykjavík on Route 1.