Words by

Ciarán Daly

@ciaran_daly

Photo by

Nikolai Galitzine

“Do you want one? You know… for the nausea?” 

The Frenchman holds out a blister pack of motion sickness tablets. He and his companions, all laden with huge telescopic cameras, have all popped some. But I politely decline. The sea looks calm; it’s a clear day. Plus, I’ve never been seasick in my life. What would I need medicine for? 

It’s around my sixth trip to the bathroom that I begin to regret this decision. One hour out of the fjord, and the upper deck is lined with queasy, swamp-faced passengers, all clutching paper bags. The boat crashes through wave after wave, up and down, up and down. 

A crackly feed of Peppa Pig, Icelandic-dubbed, runs on the TV while people hurl. Below deck, those presumably more familiar with the journey quietly play cards as three slow tempestuous hours pass by. The ferry trip north from Dalvík isn’t always this choppy, one of the sailors tells me — although “it can be”. No shit. Getting to Grímsey is not easy. It’s a test. 

A DIY ethic

If you thought life on the mainland was challenging, Grímsey is Iceland on hard mode. This small Arctic island, just 5 km in area, is a three-hour boat ride off the north coast, making it one of the most remote settlements in the country. There’s one shop, one bar, one pool, one airstrip, and a handful of houses. Almost everything has to be brought over by boat. Unlike the mainland, which has abundant renewable energy and hot water, Grímseyingar rely on diesel generators and electric heaters.  It is not blessed with the convenience of a ring road, nor a 10/11, nor a hospital. And, under the jurisdiction of Akureyrarbær since 2009, it no longer has its own mayor.

In other words, if something needs doing, it’s up to the islanders to get it done. Life here breeds self-reliance and a DIY ethic; work starts young. As I walk past the harbour, I notice two lads running around, no older than 11 or 12. They’re wearing toolbelts and carrying around some kind of seabird. A few hours later, I bump into them again outside a hobbit-sized wooden shack on the lake, complete with a service hatch, a lounge interior, and a decked terrace. “I’m Björn, and this is Konni,” says one of the boys as he puts down a screwdriver.  

“What is this place?” I ask. 

“It’s going to be a shop. We built all of it ourselves,” says Björn. I ask him what they’re selling. He says something to Konni, who dashes into the shop and comes back out holding a small wood carving in the shape of the island. “We’re selling these. Have you got any money?” Konni shouts: “1.000 krónur!” 

An uncertain future  

The boys are the youngest in a long line of islanders, and it seems they have inherited their ancestors’ grit. Grímsey has been continuously inhabited since at least the 11th century, if not earlier. In that time, its people have fought to maintain the skills and the knowledge to endure here, largely self-sufficient from the mainland. And it’s easy to understand why: this place is gorgeous. The nature here is raw, untamed, buffeted by waves and wind and the elements. The cliffs teem with birds, while the surrounding waters make up some of the most populous fishing grounds in the country. 

But after nearly a millennia, the future of Grímsey is now uncertain.  

Four years ago, when the local church burned down, it felt like a nail in the coffin for the island’s dwindling population. In a one-off gesture of solidarity, people from all over Iceland came together to fund its reconstruction, and last week, the newly rebuilt church was finally consecrated by the Bishop of Iceland.  

A church is a promise to the future, to those that are to come. But sadly, a church — no matter how beautiful — cannot solve all the problems of the present. If the new church is to last another 900 years, Grímsey needs much more than one-off acts of charity. As one Grímseyingur quietly confides: “I could not care less. We need more quota.” 

One poem left  

In the 1980s, Grímsey was a thriving fishing hub. Archive footage shows a bustling harbour with busy factories, all now repurposed or unused. During that time, a number of locally owned companies employed dozens of people, sharing the island’s fishing quota among them. At its peak, the island was able to support up to 130 permanent residents.  

But since that time, changes to fishing policy have led to a series of calamities for Grímsey. During the 90s, new laws came into place which effectively privatised fishing rights in Iceland. Companies could now buy and sell quota to one another and even take out loans against it, changing what was a shared resource into a tradable commodity. Over the years, this has seen the fishing quota move into fewer and fewer hands, causing an imbalance between large companies and smaller operators. 

Amid mounting debts, rising prices, and a harsher economy, the pressure proved too much for many of the islanders. In the space of 30 years, the population of Grímsey plummeted — from hundreds to dozens. Today, just 25 or so full-time residents remain. 

Nikolai Galitzine is an honorary Grímseyingur who has spent the last four years researching the island for an upcoming film, ISLANDER. In the course of his work, he has been given unprecedented access to the photography archive of Grímsey, and has a visual record of how things have changed over the years.  “These hard times led to an erosion of the island’s culture. Grímsey used to be famous for chess, ever since the 1800s when the American writer Daniel Willard Fiske donated chess sets to each family,” he says. “Today, none of the chess sets remain. You rarely see anybody in national dress. The island only has one ríma [a traditional Icelandic poem] left, but no choir to sing it. Things are getting desperate.” 

Working through the gaps 

It might be tempting for city dwellers to brush off issues like fishing as a distant problem for distant communities. But every important issue in Iceland, everything, lies downstream of fishing.  

Today, Grímsey’s fishing companies rely on a combination of leased quotas and byggðakvóti — the publicly owned quota afforded to coastal communities for a number of days during the summer. Outside of these companies, other families who sold up their quota years ago now subsist solely on byggðakvóti. 

Raised on the island from the age of four, Siggi, like other Grímseyingar, has been fishing his entire life. He and his brothers Jói and Henning are the owners of Fiskmarkaður Grímsey ehf, which operates fishing boats as well as the harbour’s fish market. Like other fishermen on the island, Siggi has other businesses: Heimskautssport ehf, a boat repair and servicing workshop plus Muninn ehf, the company he runs with his wife which operates the island’s hot dog stand, plus the bike and jet ski rental. When we speak, he’s not long back from a fishing trip. How was it? “It was good. But the price of leasing quota is just rising like crazy,” he says. “It’s becoming nearly impossible.”  

Siggi describes the mind-boggling array of rules and details: species of fish, types of quota, price per kilo, fishing methods, days at sea. Combined, these form a tangled net of constantly shifting regulations and stipulations around which fishermen must work if they are to have any hope of making an income. Of course, facing up to the utterly Byzantine quota system is nothing new. But last year, one government decision proved particularly devastating. 

In October 2024, the government announced that in order to continue receiving byggðakvóti, fishermen must have their catches processed prior to selling them on the open market. Whereas previously, they could simply put their catch on ice and ship it to a buyer, now they must prepare their fish in a factory: weighing, gutting, filleting, the lot, all while paying for the privilege.  

This means major investments in new facilities, up-to-date machinery, health and safety. While this isn’t totally unfeasible for mainland towns with the right manpower and facilities, it is for places like Grímsey — which, as well as lacking a modern factory, faces a housing shortage and an inconsistent ferry service.  

“We rely on the quota from the government, but suddenly, in return, they wanted us to pack or fillet it on the island in order to sell it. But in winter, the ferry only comes three days a week, and she leaves after two hours,” explains Siggi. “We’ve only got a short window to get the fish to the buyers as soon as possible. But, if there’s bad weather, we can’t send it to the mainland for three to five days and we’re stuck here with the fish.”  

“So, to make this system feasible year-round, we’d need the ferry to travel every day and we’d need to fillet between 800 and 900 tonnes of fish in order to cover all the costs of shipping and labour and everything else. Currently, the island only gets enough byggðakvóti for maybe 300 tonnes, then we annually lease extra quotas, meaning the total amount fished by Grímsey is about 500-600 tonnes. So if we were to process more than that, we’d have to suddenly buy the fish from Akureyri or Dalvik, ship it here, fillet it, then send it back and sell it, meaning we’d be paying double for everything. It would be totally impossible.”  

A protest with teeth 

When the rule change was announced, it sparked uproar on the island. In perhaps one of the only acts of public protest in its history, four families put their houses up for sale and vowed to leave. This threat had some teeth.  

Since 1952, Iceland’s fishing waters have extended 370 km from land, with the northern baseline of that fishing territory being Kolbeinsey — a tiny, uninhabited rock 105 km off the northern coast of Iceland. Despite the fact that Kolbeinsey is slowly receding into the sea, an agreement was reached in 1997 to fix the fishing boundary to it. This gives Iceland control over a total of 9,400 km² of waters that would otherwise likely belong to Greenland.   

Many of the islanders maintain that, if Grímsey were to become uninhabited for one reason or another, Iceland could lose its territorial claim to Kolbeinsey, and the line would move to a vacated Grímsey — resulting in the drastic reduction of Iceland’s overall fishing waters.  Although nobody actually ended up selling, the protest paid off. Grímsey was given a three-year stay of execution by way of temporary extra quota from the government. 

What happens next remains to be seen. The departing Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture announced a working group in parliament to specifically examine the case of Grímsey, but since the arrival of the new government, there’s been no word further. However, more than its predecessors, the current government seems more supportive of coastal fishermen; there is currently an ongoing battle for a 48-day extension to the summer fishing season, which would be a lifeline to both the island and other coastal towns. But the fishing corporations are lobbying ministers against this, and it’s not yet clear what the outcome will be. Until then, it’s up to the islanders to try and endure an increasingly hostile set of impositions on their livelihoods, and hope that doing so will be enough to survive. 

A chicken and egg problem 

One answer — maybe the only answer — offered to Iceland’s economic ills in the last decade has been tourism. Indeed, many of Iceland’s traditional industries, from farming to fishing, have been more or less bulldozed to make way for the tourist economy. But these industries remain a lifeline for hundreds of communities where it’s unlikely, if not unfeasible, for tourism to ever provide a serious year-round income. Not everybody wants to stop doing the things they know and love just to work in the travel sector; Grímseyingar are experts in fishing this area, with a local name for every undersea area and mountain.  

Grímsey itself is not devoid of tourism. If you sit in the harbour for long enough, you might see a cruise ship anchor offshore, then witness small boats carrying Goretex-clad retirees into the dock. When this coincides with the arrival of the ferry from Dalvík, the island’s hiking trails become abuzz with tourists desperate to snap a selfie with puffins or the large concrete ball marking the Arctic circle. Krían, the island’s only restaurant and main community hub, is suddenly rammed. It’s bizarre to witness such a short-lived flurry of activity in such an isolated place.

When the raincoats leave and the dust settles, the only noise is from the birds. It’s now that I meet Halla, who like many other Grímseyingar, seems to spend summer working a truly frantic schedule. As well as running one of the island’s guesthouses, which includes preparing rooms, making breakfast, and collecting guests from the harbour, Halla also runs guided tours of the island for visitors from the cruise ships. She tells me that although tourism is growing, it faces the same major obstacle afflicting the fishing business: “We need more people.” 

“We are so few,” says Halla. “I don’t necessarily want mass tourism on the island, but I have lots of people who want to come over here and work for me. The problem is that I don’t have any accommodation for them. We don’t have any houses available, so somebody has to build new houses. But if you were to build a house here it’s going to cost maybe three times what it would on the mainland. So is it us, or is it a company, or is it the government who will do that? It’s a chicken and egg problem.” 

Finding ways to survive 

Even if the island were to suddenly gain more residents and infrastructure, tourism is simply not a viable, year-round economy. Most only visit in the summer, so that’s only two to three months of income annually. And, with so few businesses able to cater to tourists — many of whom don’t even end up spending any money on the island — not everybody stands to benefit.  

Ragnheiður, known on the island as Gagga, has lived on Grímsey since 1980. She and her husband built their home in 1988, and have lived there ever since. Like everyone else here, she’s a grafter: when we speak, she’s just come back from a shift at the airport, and also runs one of the island’s guesthouses.   

Despite her connections to tourism, she’s blunt in her assessment of what it can achieve for Grímsey. “Fishing is the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth most important thing here,” she says. “Fishing is what makes it possible for us to live here. If it was just tourism, everybody would leave and close the door.”  

She continues: “I like everyone who comes to Grímsey, and I welcome everybody. I’m glad if people want to come here, but this is not our living. We can’t survive off tourism. No, it’s just June and July, and we couldn’t live off it for the whole year.” 

Does she think people will abandon Grímsey? “I’m not worried about people leaving. If it happens, it happens,” says Gagga. “But this is the situation and you just have to live with it — you have to find ways to survive. You have to make the best out of your circumstances. In a small community like this, you know everything about everyone, yes, but we are well connected, and that means you also know if something is wrong, and you can help out.” 

A fool’s folly?  

If one thing is clear from my conversations with the islanders, it’s that nobody is in a rush to leave Grímsey. They want to remain in the place that they call home. But the clock is ticking.  

“One thing I never understand is that when it was very hard living here, there were hundreds of people,” Halla tells me. “Today, living here is much easier, but there’s only 20 or 30 of us. It doesn’t make any sense.” But maybe it does. How can it be the case that, decades ago, Grímsey was one of the bread baskets of north Iceland, but in 2025, its residents must be content with mere survival on an island surrounded with fish they can’t afford to catch? 

The scale of the challenges facing Iceland’s remote fishing communities should be viewed as a national crisis, one ultimately rooted in greed and monopoly capitalism. For decades, the big fishing companies have dictated government policy and choked out small-scale fishermen using their financial clout. In the words of Siggi: “They are just too big to mess with.” As the fishing quota has become concentrated into their hands, these companies have gained the power to decide which communities live and which communities die.

If the government does not urgently correct this imbalance and give remote coastal communities the means to work and prosper with dignity, then this story will reach a tragic conclusion. Any remaining natural resources held in common, from fishing waters to farms, will be parcelled up and sold off to the highest bidder. Places like Grímsey will vanish. And, in the end, Icelanders will lose their connection to the land, to their history, and to their identities.  

At the end of my trip, I catch up with Nikolai again. “I know almost no Icelander that has ever been to Grímsey,” he says. “It seems like they would rather have everyone move to the mainland — they probably wonder why anybody even wants to live on Grímsey.”  

“But by that logic, you could ask: what is anybody doing in Iceland anyway? Why do people still live here, instead of moving back to Norway? It’s a tiny, ridiculous rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. The whole thing is a fool’s folly. But foolishness is important for humanity. If we weren’t foolish, we wouldn’t be doing anything worthwhile. So how far do we take it? Should we force everyone to live in urban areas, in little beehives — or should we support the independent people?” 

Nikolai’s film about Grímsey, ISLANDER, is set to showcase as a work in progress at Nordisk Panorama Film Festival next month. Read more about it here.