Europa del Norte
Volcanic · Geothermal · Ethereal
Iceland has the world's oldest functioning parliament, the Althing, founded in 930 AD — and was the first country to have a democratically elected female head of state, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, in 1980.
Más allá de la capital, las principales ciudades son Akureyri, Kópavogur — cada una un centro de cultura regional, economía e historia. Reykjavik is the world's northernmost capital city and a city of 130,000 people where the Aurora Borealis is visible in winter from the city streets and the midnight sun creates summer nights where ambient light makes sleep physiologically difficult — a capital built on geothermal energy so thoroughly that 90% of heating is geothermal, making Iceland's per-capita carbon footprint from heating essentially zero.
El idioma oficial es islandés, que refleja el patrimonio cultural del país y lo conecta con una amplia comunidad internacional. Internacionalmente, Islandia se contacta mediante el código +354. Icelanders maintained genetic and documentary continuity across 1,100 years of settlement, making deCODE Genetics' Icelandic population study (begun 1996) among the most scientifically valuable genealogical databases in the world — a country where the sagas preserve detailed family trees to the 9th century and where most inhabitants can trace descent to the original Norse and Irish settlers.
El tráfico rodado circula por la derecha, en consonancia con la convención de
La vida económica y cotidiana se rige por la zona horaria de UTC, alineando el país con sus vecinos regionales.
Hákarl — fermented Greenlandic shark buried in gravel for six months and then dried for another four — is Iceland's most notorious traditional food, its intense ammonia smell serving as an effective deterrent to the curious, while skyr (a strained dairy product between yogurt and cheese), lamb soup, and pan-fried Arctic char represent Iceland's more approachable culinary traditions.
Handball is Iceland's most disproportionately successful sport — a country of 370,000 winning Olympic silver in 2008 when the men's team defeated Denmark, Spain, and France to reach the final — while the 2016 Euro football tournament produced Iceland's thunderclap clapping celebration performed with a stadium of fans that became one of sport's most imitated crowd rituals.
Vatnajökull is Europe's largest glacier by volume — a 8,100-square-kilometre ice cap overlying several active volcanoes, most famously Grímsvötn, whose sub-glacial eruptions create jökulhlaup (glacial outburst floods) that periodically reshape the coastal landscape in single events carrying more water than the Amazon River discharges in a day.