Djúpavík in Árneshreppur on Strandir would be translated as "the deep bay" as it is located deep on the shore of Strandir.
There are two things that really catch your eye when you drive into Djúpavik other than the old buildings of the former herring factory. That is an old rusty ship on the right side...
and a waterfall on the left side.
The waterfall is called Eiðrofi but it goes a story with the name. Eiðrofi means "A broken promise" but there is a folk tale about a girl who threw her self down the waterfall after her boyfriend betrayed her.
The herring processing started in Djúpavík in 1917 when Elías Stefánsson started a buissines in salting the fish there but nobody had lived there before. For a couple of years a lot of people came there to work during summers and houses were built there for living as well as shops and a bakery. After the big depression in 1919 the herring procession stopped again.
In the year 1934 a new company was organized by a group of people and they started to build a fancy herring factory. At that time the factory was the biggest cement building on the country. All the machinery for producing fish oil and fishmeal were the biggest and best ones and the factory rose on a land filling that was made on the beach by moving soil from the mountain with a railroad trolley.
The rusty ship beside it is an old mail boat that was dragged onto the shore for the workers who built the factory to live in.
Around 200 people worked in the factory when the most herring was processed there.
When the herring disappeared from the bay some people tried to manage two boats for cod process but that wasn't so successful.
The machines in the herring factory silenced in the year 1954 and people began to leave the place.
Djúpavík was a bit like a ghost town until 1985 when some people started to rebuild some of the old houses and today Hotel Djúpavík is run in one of them. The people running the hotel also run some of the old factory hoses as an Art festival venue.
When we arrived in Djúpavík we started by getting some coffee in the Hotel but we didn´t get to pay for the coffee, it was just free for all. Then I went to a small beach by the road with my dogs and gave them water to drink.
After that we went over to the factory to look around and we went inside to see an art exhibition in one of the buildings.
I don´t know what it is, maybe some kind of echo of the past but I love old crumbled buildings like these ones.
And as a photo material it has such a beautiful texture and form.
There is small hole inside the tanks that once kept the fish-oil and I had to take some photos inside them even though I didn't go all the way inside. Just put my head in the hole.
It has a magnificent soundscape as well so I had to try to sing a little bit to test the sound.
After an hour or so we took on the road back to Hólmavík again. It was still foggy at first but the sun was struggling to shine through the fog.
When we got closer to Hólmavík the sun was winning the battle.
More about my trip to Strandir tomorrow but I went to another daytrip to the swimmingpool on the beach of Krossanes and to another herring factory site in Ingólfsfjörður but that´s where my son found the horse scull many years ago (wich I talked about in my blog yesterday). Sleep tight!
M.