ATV Tour: Puffin and Pirates

Vestmannaeyjar is the natural jewel and a historical rich island which many overlook during their travels. Westman Islands hosts the biggest puffin colony in the entire world, making it a haven for nature and bird lovers wanting up close views of these amazing and friendly locals.

Here in this new tour, we combine visiting the home place of puffins and walking right into the history of pirates with an easy and fun road driving with ATV’s.

We start our drive from the town to the west coast of Westman Islands, driving besides amazing cliffs and hills until we reach the ocean where we see The Elephant Rock. We see it standing strong with its trunk in the ocean while waves crash at the cliffs around. If you look close, you’ll notice how the rock pattern mimic the textured skin of elephants incredibly well.

From there on we continue along the ocean coast and drive all the way to the southernmost side of Westman Island, right to the puffins. This road shows the amazing outstretched views of the clusters of islands stretching out to sea as far as the eye can see. During sunny days, the glittering sunlight and still ocean is breathtaking and we will drive the entire way seeing all of it. In good weather, you might catch a glimpse of Surtsey, the youngest island formed in the entire world. An underwater volcanic eruption created this island in 1963 and even to this day, no others except for scientists are allowed on the island.

We continue the drive beside black sand beaches towards the edge of the island all the way to the top. There, we see colonies of puffins taking flights, socializing and flying back in to land into their burrows. While we watch these friendly and colorful ocean birds our tour guide will share local history and knowledge about these neighbors that we love.

At the top of Stórhöfði is also registered as the windiest place in Europe, having documented winds as strong as 180 km/h.
But this amazing place is absolutely breathtaking when the breezes are still down and you see sheep and puffins standing in views with islands, mountains and endless ocean.

From there we drive onto the historical scenes of real pirates. We get the rare chance to relive and put ourselves into the dramatic pirate invasion that took place here in 1627. We get to see real life historical proof of how locals tried to maneuver and hide from attacking barbary corsairs pirates. Our tour guide will delve into how these barbary pirates arrived, plundered, kidnapped and turned this community upside down in an epic survival chase between pirates and people who knew this island better than themselves.

To learn about the other pirates, we move down into Herjólfstown. Where we visit and see how these icelandic pirates became settlers in Westman Islands, how they lived and even how they could have looked like. During our stay there we learn and see how life might have looked like for locals trying to build life here centuries ago.

We will finally end our ATV drive back at our meeting point, filled with wonder and captured amazing memories of breathtaking views, whole puffin colonies and the thrill of the Pirate raids.