Isafjörður

Ísafjörður grew on a sand spit in Skutulsfjörður, a sheltered inlet opening into the larger Ísafjarðardjúp of Iceland's Westfjords. The Book of Settlements attributes the first settlement of the fjord to Helgi Magri Hrólfsson. In the sixteenth century foreign merchants used the harbor as a trading post, and Ísafjörður later received municipal status in 1786. Wooden buildings at the old Danish trading station recall eighteenth-century commerce, when ships and their cargoes tied this remote fjord to the North Atlantic world.