As we continued our tour of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, we came upon a mysterious black sand beach with the name of Djúpalónssandur, which translates to Deep Lagoon Sand. This name traces back to the initial first settlers of Iceland, some 1200 years ago.
One can imagine this cove during the days of yore, when it was home to 60 fishing boats, creating a strong economic foundation for people in this part of the Snæfellsnes peninsula. If you look carefully, you see the strewn remains of the Epine (GY7), a fishing trawler that was wrecked here on March 13, 1948; the Epine hailed from the port town of Grimsby in North East Lincolnshire, England.
Another feature of this beach are the glistening pebbles that cover it, which are know as Djúpalónsperlur, or “pearls of the deep lagoon”. These pearls on the beach stunning and appealing, but should be left alone, as it is against the law to collect them as a souvenir of your trip!
The path down to the beach is a bit of a steep descent (and climb on the way back), as the parking area is high and dry upon the volcanic cliffs. As you walk toward the beach, you may want to test your strength to see if you would qualify to work on one of the fishing boats. The four Aflraunasteinar, or Lifting Stones, are along the path toward the beach. These stones range from Fullsterkur (full strength) weighing 154 kg, Hálfsterkur (half strength) weighing 100 kg, Hálfdrættingur (weakling) weighing 54 kg to Amlóði (useless) at 23 kg; to qualify for work on a fishing boat you should at least be able to lift Hálfdrættingur.
A word of caution is that this is definitely not a swimming area, as the Atlantic Ocean has unpredictable and strong rip currents here that will pull one far into sea. Also, it is not wise to go wading here, as surprise waves will often come far onto the beach.
On the photography part, both images were capture with my Canon EOS R5 mirrorless, using a Canon RF24-105mm F4 L IS USM lens. First level processing of the images was done using Skylum’s Luminar AI software; for these images, I created a template based on the Backlit Clouds template that is part of the Overcast collection of templates. Touch up processing was done in Photoshop.
Dutch goes the Photo! 