Another horrific reckoning with modern tourism
Yukio Mishima crystallised the empty pathos of life in a once-proud nation dealing with rapid hyper-modernisation with his story collection Death at Midsummer. The haunting title story presents a mother dealing with the death of her children, who drown off Izu Peninsula in Japan, unable to locate the tools in her environment for solace.
Loss of a child
This week, Iceland is facing an empty horror. On Saturday, August 2, among a crowd of 200 at Reynisfjara beach, a nine-year-old child was swept to sea and drowned, while her parents and sister looked on helplessly.
Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið was the first to capture the magnitude of this catastrophe when they interviewed two Estonian tourists who had been at the scene.
As recapped in local media, the tourists stated that on arrival at Reynisfjara, battling large crowds, when they passed warning signs, they had not quite comprehended their significance. Once at the beach, they noticed something was wrong, as tourists seemed trapped by oncoming waves at the scenic Hálsanefshellir cave.
“I was standing a bit farther away with my child and then saw the 12-year-old sister running out of the cave, shouting: ‘Please help, save my sister,’ in English,” Estonian tourist Alvi Murd-Murulauk told Morgunblaðið.
The girl had been caught by Reynisfjara’s notorious “sneaker” wave and pulled to sea.
The danger of the sea at this specific beach became clear as rescue attempts were made. Onlookers grabbed a life buoy attached to a rescue rope that was too short to reach the girl. According to Alvi, “Three or four men had great difficulty pulling the rope back in after it had been thrown out. You can imagine what would’ve happened if someone had been holding onto the other end.”
What followed was excruciating.
“[The girl] was incredibly, incredibly strong, and her mother was showing her how to float while her father ran around looking for help and tried to get out into the waves to reach her… We watched her struggle for half an hour but couldn’t help her. There was nothing we could do.”
We didn’t ask for this
Íris Guðnadóttir is one of the landowners of Reynisfjara, and she agreed to speak with the Grapevine, serving as best she could as a spokesperson. Her family has farmed the area for over 200 years.
I ask her how Reynisfjara became a tourist attraction at all.
“For the last 25 years, big tourist companies have been arranging trips without even asking,” she says. “We, the farmers, were never asked. Nobody asked permission, but [they] just brought big buses.”
This is a confounding history. For Íris, the rush seemed to begin in 2000, but “the farmers have never advertised or asked anyone to come…people just come.” The landowners were left reacting with limited expertise, training, or guidance. She notes all of the people who hold ties to this land “have other jobs. I’m an engineer.”
“We’ve just been reacting because of all the people that are coming.”
To give some context of the lack of infrastructure, Íris explains, “In 2023 some of the landowners started collecting for a parking lot because of the explosion in visitors, and the buses could not turn around without a parking lot. The buses were just getting stuck.”
It was in this ad hoc environment that the disaster occurred.
“We’ve been trying to educate people since 2016,” Íris states. “We made a place for sightseeing up where you can see the cliffs and you are safe. An outlook. This is the same place where the [warning] signs are located.”
A slow sad discussion of what Íris and her fellow landowners have done to attempt to prevent injuries follows. As covered in the Grapevine, large signs with red, yellow, and green lights have been mounted on a platform above the dangerous section of the beach. Warning lights are based on reports from the highway authority, instructing visitors to use extreme caution during “yellow” warnings and to stay off the beach entirely during the worst weather.
The rush of tourists on Saturday, August 2, did not heed the sign. However, following this incident, the basalt columns and Hálsanefshellir Cave will be closed to the public entirely during “red” warnings. Additionally, the threshold has been reduced, meaning a red warning would be triggered more easily.
Íris concludes our interview, stating, “We tried as best we could. We work closely with the authorities.”
Photo by Art Bicnick
Mitigating disaster
Arnar Már Ólafsson is the Head of the Icelandic Tourist Board. He spoke with us this week about the incident. I begin by asking his perspective on the rise of these specific locations: local, family-owned properties that have become tourist attractions.
“The private landowners, in many cases, they didn’t ask for it,” he says. “We know that tourism has done a great thing for the rural areas of Iceland.”
He gives a deadpan explanation on why Reynisfjara is so dangerous: “Most incidents happen where most travellers are… Reynisfjara is one of the most visited sites in the country, receiving 500,000 visitors a year.”
The numbers are there. Arnar Már even attempts to offer perspective: “If you look at Icelandic fatalities, in the Alps it’s much more frequent.”
Finally, I quote our publisher Jón Trausti, who stated on the morning before the phone call: “There is a sense that with these places, you just know that somebody is going to die there.”
“We can’t exclude the possibility of people getting hurt or injured. We can inform,” Arnar Már responds.
On August 6, 2025, the day greater protections were put into place at Reynisfjara, we sent our photographer Art Bicnick to the beach. We were looking for a solemn photo of this almost haunted location to document the moment. He struggled — kids were playing in the water.
“A number of children were playing in the water. The parents were right there,” Art Bicnick told me, shocked. “The parents didn’t know anything was wrong, and I saw a boy get caught by a sneaker wave. Everybody seemed to realise then. They just didn’t understand,” Art went on.
Exponential rise in tourism
In 2000, Iceland had a total of 302,900 tourists, according to the Icelandic Tourist Board. This is the year visits to Reynisfjara started noticeably increasing, according to the landowners. At that point, there were roughly as many tourists as locals. The income from tourism at that point was roughly 40.8 billion ISK. A tourist in 2000 would be guided to what we call the Golden Circle: Gullfoss, Geysir and Þingvellir. An ambitious tourist might go visit the Saga Manuscripts on display in Reykjavík.
In 2023, Iceland had 2,224,000 tourists, according to the Icelandic Tourist Board. That is the year Reynisfjara became so crowded that buses could not turn around. At that point, Iceland took in 497.9 billion ISK in tourism revenue. Tourists now can see the same sights, but with exponentially greater crowds, or they can search for their own experience. It is this increase in tourism that has helped us in the culture industry thrive. The laissez-faire approach from Iceland as a whole toward the industry has even been key in developing what we casually refer to as “DIY aesthetic.” But the downsides are enormous.
We have covered incidents of farms trampled, human waste contaminations, and flurries of traffic accidents, all attributable to this massive influx. This summer’s loss, though, of a nine-year-old girl feels like the ultimate condemnation of our casual past attitudes.
The brutality and beauty of Yukio’s short story come to mind repeatedly. In that story, a woman loses her children to the waves while at the beach. As Yukio writes, “Such incidents of course go far beyond the dictates of custom, and yet at no time are people more bound to follow custom.”
Eventually, a distance is accepted. Yukio writes:
The incident shone far away, a lighthouse on a distant headland… Rather than an injury it became a moral lesson, and it changed from a concrete fact to a metaphor. It was no longer property of the Ikuta family, it was public…. People should read the lesson. An old, simple lesson that parents may be expected to have engraved in their minds: You have to watch children constantly when you take them to the beach. People drown where you would never think possible.
If only the moral lesson were ever so clear, or if it could allow us to relieve ourselves of the shock of this recent loss.
[Editor’s note: This seems like a good time to state that there is no Reynisfjörður; but if one uses Google Translate, Reynis-fjördur, or fjord, is presented as the English translation of Reynis-fjara, or beach.]
Buy subscriptions, t-shirts and more from our shop right here!
