Reykjavik

Reykjavik is Iceland's only real city, though calling it a city undersells how compact and unhurried it feels. Most of the country's population lives here or nearby, and the centre can be walked end to end in under an hour. What it lacks in scale it makes up for in concentration: corrugated-iron houses painted in flat primary colours, a harbour still working, and a skyline dominated by a single church tower rather than anything taller.

The city's founding is tangled up in Norse settlement myth, with steam from nearby hot springs supposedly giving the place its name. That geothermal undercurrent still defines it — pavements are heated, pools are heated, and the whole place runs on volcanic plumbing rather than imported fuel. It gives Reykjavik a slightly improvised, make-do character, as if the city were built around the land's temperament rather than against it.

Culturally, it punches well past its size. Icelandic sagas, a strong literary tradition and a music scene that has produced far more internationally known acts than the population would suggest all sit alongside a design and food culture that borrows from Scandinavia but stays distinctly its own. There is a bluntness to the place — in its architecture, its weather, its humour — that keeps it from ever feeling twee.

Reykjavik also functions as the country's hinge point: the place you land, provision, and leave from before the rest of Iceland takes over. But treating it purely as a gateway misses the point. Its museums, its street art, its bars that stay half-lit until late, and its unglamorous working harbour are worth a proper stop, not just a night before the ring road.