Gufuá - The Farm
Our farm Gufuá is located just north of Borgarnes.
Gufuá has served as a home to various Icelanders since its settlement, with the last residents moving out in 1964. The farm then remained uninhabited until we acquired it in 2018.
Gufuá is located in an incredibly beautiful part of West Iceland: on the farm you can find hills where original birch grows, waterfalls, gorges and even a canyon. The farm is named after the salmon river Gufuá (“River of Steam”), which flows through it. The farm is also located in the same area as the notorious Egill Skallagrímsson from the Icelandic Sagas first settled, around 1000 years ago.
Since moving here, Gufuá has given us the chance to intertwine our passion for farming with our commitment to slow and mindful tourism.
Riding and taming horses has been the cornerstone of our lives as farmers for over 40 years. Gufuá is a working farm and it is not uncommon to spot some Icelandic horses during your visit. Since 2018, we’ve had the chance to expand and welcome new friends: sheep (including the uniquely Icelandic leader sheep), goats, chickens, the occasional duck and, of course, dogs and cats. Sustainability and harmony with nature form the basis of our farming practices at Gufuá.
A bit of History
Our farm is located on one of the oldest settled lands in all of Iceland.
The famous Egill Skallagrímsson, a particularly ill-tempered Viking settler, claimed the land around what is now the town of Borgarnes. Even though Skallagrímur, Egill’s father, had already settled here, his men were allowed to settle within his borders. One of these men was Bjarni, also called Bjarni the Red. This nickname comes from the fact that he was the first man in Iceland to smelt metal from red bog iron (“mýrarrauði”) – an ingenious process where particularly iron-rich water from bogs or swamps was worked to create weapons and tools. Easily identified by the red hue of the soil, these bogs exist in abundance at Gufuá, making it an ideal location for any future Vikings settlers.
Conservation work
In an effort to give back to the land that has given us so much, in the summer of 2019, we started a reforestation project in cooperation with the State Forestry.
Since then, we have planted approximately 10.000 trees. The project will continue for the next 10 years and will see us planting in 175 acres of land – which is approximately the size of 132 football fields! Gufuá is also the first farm in Iceland to participate in the High Nature Value (HNV) farming program, a scheme targeted at biodiversity and preservation of high nature value farming and forestry systems, water and climate change.
The purpose of the program rhymes with our own, where responsible farming and conservation are practiced side by side. In the 80s, ditches were dug through most Icelandic marshes in an effort to dry up the lands for farming purposes. In an effort to reclaim the original wetland, our ditches are being refilled, restoring the natural habitat of the local wildlife. The ultimate aim of the project is to explore the possibility of integrating agriculture and nature conservation, as well as identifying opportunities, barriers, synergies and potential benefits of conservation measures in agricultural areas.
