Thingvellir National Park
— — the seam where two continents quietly part.
Not only on a wall.
“A rift valley where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart a couple of centimetres a year. Iceland's first parliament, the Alþingi, met in the open air on this lava plain in 930 AD and kept meeting there for eight centuries. The Almannagjá gorge runs straight through the site; the river Öxará drops into it as a thin waterfall, and Þingvallavatn, the country's largest natural lake, sits below. UNESCO listed the park in 2004.
Thingvellir National Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Þingvellir lies in a rift valley about 45 kilometres east of Reykjavík, on the southern flank of the active volcanic zone that runs the length of Iceland. The valley floor is widening by roughly 2 centimetres a year as the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart, and the Almannagjá fault scarp on the western edge is the most legible piece of that motion above water. The site was declared a national park in 1930, on the thousandth anniversary of the founding of the Alþingi, and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2004 as a cultural landscape.
Þingvallavatn, at the south end of the park, covers about 84 square kilometres and is Iceland's largest natural lake. Most of its inflow comes not from the river Öxará but from groundwater filtered for decades through the surrounding lava field; the water arrives at the lake almost free of sediment, and a brown-trout strain endemic to the lake grows unusually large on that clean supply. The Silfra fissure, a flooded crack between the two plates near the Þingvellir church, is one of the few places in the world where snorkelers swim through clear water with one hand on each continent.
The Alþingi met at Þingvellir every summer from 930 AD until 1798, making it one of the oldest documented parliaments in the world. Free men from across the island travelled to the Lögberg, the Law Rock, to hear the speaker recite a third of the law each year. Iceland's conversion to Christianity was declared on the same plain in 1000 AD, and the modern republic was proclaimed there on 17 June 1944. The site still hosts national observances; the park visitor centre on the Hakið ridge marks the major anniversaries.