Westman Islands Boat Tour from Heimaey
A westman islands boat tour departs from Heimaey harbor to explore volcanic sea cliffs, puffin colonies, and coastal caves around the archipelago. These Westman Islands tours navigate past Surtsey volcano, Elephant Rock, and seabird nesting sites along dramatic basalt formations. The westman islands boat tour tickets include guided commentary on the 1973 eruption, marine wildlife spotting, and views of Heimaey's coastal landmarks.
The Westman Islands erupted into existence 10,000 years ago, and the youngest island in the chain—Surtsey—broke the surface in 1963, witnessed by fishermen who thought they had stumbled upon a submarine on fire.
Today the fifteen-island archipelago holds one of the world's largest Atlantic puffin colonies, with an estimated ten to twelve million birds nesting on its cliffs each summer. Heimaey, the only inhabited island, was itself reshaped overnight in 1973 when the Eldfell volcano split the town in two, forcing the entire population of 5,300 to evacuate by fishing boat under cover of darkness.
A Westman Islands boat tour departs from Heimaey's harbor and threads the narrow sound between Heimaey and the uninhabited outer islands, where vertical basalt columns rise two hundred meters from the sea and wave-cut caves penetrate deep into the cliff face. The water here is cold—rarely above eight degrees Celsius—but nutrient-rich, drawing capelin, herring, and sand eels, which in turn sustain the puffin rookeries that carpet the slopes of Heimaklettur and Háey from May through August. Operators running westman islands rib boat excursions time their departures to coincide with the puffins' evening return flights, when thousands of birds stream back to their burrows with beaks full of fish.
The coastline also reveals the archipelago's volcanic anatomy. Elephant Rock, a natural arch carved by millennia of storm surge, resembles a basalt pachyderm dipping its trunk into the Atlantic. The cliffs of Klettshellir open into a sea cave tall enough to accommodate a small vessel, its walls striped with oxidized iron and palagonite—a golden clay formed when lava meets seawater. Guides on westman islands puffin boat trips point out the old coastal defense bunkers embedded in the rock, relics of Iceland's wartime occupation, now colonized by kittiwakes and razorbills.
The tours also loop past Surtsey, a UNESCO World Heritage site closed to all but a handful of scientists who monitor its barren slopes for the first lichens, mosses, and seeds. The island remains a natural laboratory for primary succession, untouched since its formation. Closer to Heimaey, the boat slows near the submerged rim of Eldfell's 1973 lava flow, where superheated rock met the harbor and very nearly closed it off before residents mounted a weeks-long campaign to cool the advancing edge with seawater pumped from the docks.
1 hr
