A Local History of Gullfoss and the Hvítá River

Most histories of Gullfoss are really histories of twenty minutes. They begin when the visitor reaches the viewing platform and end when the visitor gets back on the bus. This one starts two or three kilometres downstream, at the farm where everything that happened to the waterfall happened to somebody first.

That is where Brattholt stands — a farm on the western bank of the Hvítá, below the falls, the last farm you pass on the way up to them. For most of the last century and a half, everything that happened to Gullfoss happened to the people in that house first. They cut the first path down to it. They were offered money for it and refused. They lost it in court, sold it to the state, and then gave away the ground around it. Their descendants built the restaurant and the hotel that several hundred thousand people a year now pass through without wondering who put them there.

I grew up at Brún, in Syðri-Reykjahverfi, further down in Biskupstungur. I fished the Hvítá with my father on that farm’s water. I went to school with the sons of the family that runs it now. What follows is the documented history and the community memory, in order, from 1907 to today — because along this river the two are not separable.

1907 is the year the whole story turns on, and almost nobody notices that three separate things happened in it.

Early that year an Englishman came asking after Gullfoss. He offered 50,000 krónur — roughly fifty times the fire-insurance valuation of the house at Brattholt. Tómas Tómasson, who owned half the falls, turned him down with the sentence that has followed him ever since: “Ég sel ekki vin minn.” I do not sell my friend.

In the autumn of the same year, the Alþingi passed a law restricting waterfall ownership to people and companies domiciled in Iceland. It was meant to close the door. Instead it made everyone relax, and speculators simply worked through Icelandic middlemen. A 150-year lease on Gullfoss was signed anyway.

And in the summer between those two events, the King of Denmark came to look at the waterfall.

The most expensive road in Icelandic history

Frederik VIII landed in Reykjavík on 30 July 1907 with a retinue of around two hundred — Danish parliamentarians, Icelandic MPs, staff. The party set out on 1 August on horseback; the King rode a grey horse. They went to Þingvellir, east to Laugarvatn, then to Geysir and Gullfoss, crossing the Hvítá on a new bridge at Brúarhlöð before continuing down through the Hreppar.

To move that many people to a waterfall in the interior, Iceland built a road. The Kóngsvegur — the King’s Road — had been cut the year before with picks, shovels and horse carts. It is generally reckoned the largest single construction project Icelanders had undertaken to that point, running to something in the order of fourteen percent of national output.

That is the scale of what was mobilised to bring one man to look at Gullfoss. And at the far end of it, where the road ran out, there was still no way down to the falls.

The path

The last stretch was made by the household at Brattholt. Sigríður Tómasdóttir and her sisters cut the first footpath down to the waterfall, and they cut it for the King’s visit in 1907.

The arithmetic there is worth sitting with. The state spent a fortune of national money on the approach. The final descent — the part where you actually see the thing — was dug by three farm women on their own account, because otherwise the King of Denmark would have arrived at the lip of a canyon with nowhere to stand.

They were already the guides. Travellers heading up to Gullfoss came past Brattholt, and one or another of the sisters would take them the rest of the way. Before there was a road, a car park, a platform or a sign, the access to Gullfoss was a path made by three women, and the interpretation was delivered in person.

Women’s hands on men’s work

This is the part I want to state plainly, because it appears nowhere in the tourist accounts.

Cutting a path down into that canyon is heavy ground work — pick and shovel, loose scree, a long drop below you. In 1907 that was strictly men’s work. It was not a category anyone argued about. It was simply how labour was divided in an Icelandic farming parish, and a woman doing it would have been remarked upon.

Sigríður waded right in and did it anyway.

That single fact tells you more about her than the whole legend that grew up afterwards. Before the court case, before Reykjavík, before any of it — she was already someone who looked at a job that was not supposed to be hers and did it.

Did Sigríður Tómasdóttir really save Gullfoss?

Not in the way the story is usually told, no. The rest of her story is better known, and told wrong almost everywhere.

Tómas had second thoughts about the lease and went to law. Sigríður threw herself into the case completely — repeated journeys to Reykjavík, river crossings in all seasons, meeting after meeting with officials. Her lawyer was Sveinn Björnsson, later Iceland’s first president. The proceedings ran six years.

They lost. The judgment went against Brattholt. It was then, with the case decided against them, that Sigríður made the threat she is remembered for: that she would throw herself into the falls the day the first spade went into the ground.

What saved Gullfoss was not a verdict. It was an unpaid invoice. The lease payments stopped arriving in 1928, and in 1934 the lease was formally struck off, having run continuously since 1907. The money for the scheme was never raised. No dam was ever begun.

So the honest version is that Sigríður lost in court and won in public. Her campaign did not void the contract. It did something slower and more durable — it made Gullfoss a thing Icelanders felt personally about, so that when the commercial case collapsed, nobody was in any hurry to revive it.

Einar Guðmundsson was born on 4 November 1904 and was taken into fosterage at Brattholt as a young boy. Not a son and not a brother — English-language sources get this wrong in both directions — but a child raised in that house.

In 1939 he bought Brattholt from Sigríður Tómasdóttir.

In 1945 the Icelandic state bought Gullfoss from Einar and from the landowners on the eastern bank. Sigríður, still living at Brattholt, did not trust the state with it. After the sale she tried to obtain legal confirmation that she had not sold the falls along with the farm. She failed.

She was right to have tried. Once the state owned Gullfoss, the state studied harnessing it. Proposals ran from the 1950s into the 1970s to divert water from the Hvítá above the falls, engineered so that a summer visitor would not be able to tell. Nothing came of it, and by the 1980s Gullfoss was off the list. But the most serious official threat to the waterfall arrived after it was in public hands, not before.

London, Paris, Rome and Uppsala

Einar was a character, and the thing everyone in the district knew about Brattholt was the names.

The sheep houses and horse houses at Brattholt are named after the great cities of the world. Not nicknames — actual recorded place names on the farm. The official place-name register for Brattholt lists Lundún (London), highest and furthest east in the home field. París, up above Heygarðsflöt, with a hollow beside it called Parísarleynir, Paris’s hiding place. Rómaborg (Rome), once a sheep house at the top of the western flats, since demolished. Uppsalir (Uppsala), a sheep house at the northern edge of the field, up against the ridge.

A boy sent out to the sheep at Brattholt was sent to London.

And here the record adds something better than the story I grew up with. When the place-name survey reached Brattholt on 20 September 1963, the informant was Einar Guðmundsson himself. Einar told the recorder that the custom was not his own. It came down from Guðni Runólfsson, who farmed Brattholt in the first half of the nineteenth century.

So the naming is not one man’s eccentricity. It is a joke more than a century and a half old, still in use, carried across at least three separate households — and the only reason we know where it started is that Einar took the trouble to explain it to a surveyor in 1963.

The fire, and the books that were in the house

Then Brattholt burned.

It happened just after the autumn réttir, the sheep round-up, when the year’s heaviest work is done and the animals are home. The house went. Sigríður and Einar lost everything they owned.

They did not leave. Rather than move away from Brattholt they made a home in part of the cowshed and lived there until a new house was ready in 1954. In 1953 the Alþingi voted Sigríður a grant — partly compensation for the fire, and partly, explicitly, in recognition of her life’s work.

There is one thing about that fire which is remembered here and recorded nowhere, and it is the part that should be.

Einar had skinnbækur in the house. Vellum books — manuscripts written on skin, the old kind. Not a farmhouse shelf of printed volumes but a real collection, and by every account in this district a remarkable one. It burned with everything else. No copy, no inventory, no list of what had been there.

I want to be careful about how I put this, because I am telling you what is remembered in Biskupstungur rather than what I can show you in a catalogue. I have not found the collection recorded in any published source, and I would be glad to be corrected by anyone who can point to one.

But the absence is itself the point. Iceland talks a great deal about its manuscripts — which were saved, which went to Copenhagen, which came home again. That conversation is about the collections somebody catalogued. It is not about the farms. Vellum stayed in private hands all over this country for centuries, in houses with turf walls and open fires, and when a house went up there was frequently nobody in a position to say what had been lost. Brattholt is one of those houses.

Whatever was in those books is not in the world any more. Nobody outside this district has ever remarked on it.

Sigríður died in 1957, in Hafnarfjörður, in her eighty-seventh year, and is buried at Haukadalur. She had lived at Brattholt her whole life and spent the last years of it in a cowshed and then a new house on the same ground.

Who owns Gullfoss today?

Gullfoss is owned by the Icelandic state and has been since 1945. The falls, the canyon below them and the ground west of the Hvítá were protected as a nature reserve in 1979, covering 164.2 hectares and classified under IUCN category III. The land around the waterfall is largely there because one farmer gave it away.

Einar spent his last decades giving the ground back. In 1974 he gave the state the land immediately adjoining the Hvítá and Gullfoss. On 11 December 1976 he handed a portion of Brattholt to the Nature Conservation Council on almost no conditions — that the land be fenced before the end of 1977, and that it be used in keeping with the spirit of the conservation laws.

In 1978 the memorial to Sigríður, carved by Ríkarður Jónsson, was raised above the falls. In 1979 Gullfoss was formally protected.

The man who sold Gullfoss to the state in 1945 spent the 1970s making certain the land around it could never be built on. Seventy-two years passed between the Englishman’s offer and legal protection, and for most of that stretch the only thing standing between Gullfoss and a turbine was a farm household with no particular power and a very long memory.

Yes, you can fish for salmon in the Hvítá — though not at Gullfoss itself. The fishing is downstream, and the good beats are spoken for.

The Hvítá of Árnessýsla rises in Hvítárvatn beneath Langjökull. It is a glacial river; together with the Ölfusá it forms the third-longest watercourse in Iceland at some 185 kilometres. Mean flow at Gullfoss is around 100 cubic metres per second, and in flood that can rise as much as twentyfold. Below the falls it runs past Brattholt, through the gorge at Brúarhlöð, past Laugarás and Iða, and joins the Sog to become the Ölfusá.

The system’s reputation is for size. The second-largest rod-caught salmon in Icelandic history came from the Hvítá at Iða on 13 June 1946 — a hen fish of 38.5 pounds, 115 centimetres. In September 1952 another giant, 37.5 pounds and 122 centimetres, was taken where the Brúará meets the Hvítá. Angling across the system is administered through Veiðifélag Árnesinga, and permits on the best beats are hard to come by.

That is the public record of Hvítá river fishing. It has very little to do with how the river was actually fished by the people living beside it.

The handshake deal

I used to go fishing for salmon in the Hvítá with my father, a few kilometres south of Gullfoss. The arrangement with the Brattholt farmer was a pure, unwritten handshake deal — the rent was simply giving him every third salmon we caught. My father was always so happy to bring the salmon up to the farm. There were no contracts. That absolute trust was the true DNA of the farming community.

What that arrangement actually was

It is easy to read that as charm. It was not charm. It was a working system, and it is worth being precise about it.

Fishing rights in Iceland attach to the land. The farmer at Brattholt held a real, legally recognised, transferable asset — the same category of asset that, a few kilometres upstream at the falls, foreign investors had pursued through a 150-year lease, a six-year lawsuit, and litigation that ran all the way to judgment.

On the farm’s own water, in the same parish, that same class of right changed hands between two men shaking hands. Priced at one salmon in three. Paid in kind, on delivery. No document produced at any point.

Consider what that takes for granted. That the count is honest. That the third fish is a fair fish and not the worst of the three. That both parties will still be here next season and the one after. That no dispute will arise requiring evidence, because there will not be a dispute.

None of that is sentimentality. It is a system running on the fact that everyone in it is permanent, visible and known — where a reputation is harder security than a signature, because you cannot move away from it.

The walk up to the farm

My father was always so happy to bring the salmon up to the farm. That is the detail I keep returning to, because it is exactly the part that does not survive being written into a contract.

Paying rent is not usually a pleasure. Under a written lease, handing over the third salmon would have been a cost — discharged, possibly resented. Instead it was the good part of the day. He arrived at a neighbour’s door with something worth having, caught that morning, and was received as a man doing a good turn rather than a tenant settling an account.

The farmer got fish he had not had to stand in a cold river for. We got the river. Nobody drafted anything.

The legacy of Brattholt passed down the family line. Njörður Marel Jónsson was a great horseman who spent his summers there, and he and his wife Lára farmed first at Minni-Borg in Grímsnes, then at Kjartansstaðir in Hraungerðishreppur from 1967. In 1978 they were offered Brattholt and took it — mixed farming first, tourism gradually.

The horses were what he was proudest of, and the district agreed with him. His breeding results ran well beyond what the farm’s means should have allowed, the honour-prize mare Perla frá Brattholti chief among them. He rode out constantly, all his life.

Their son Jón Harrý joined the operation in 1990 and Brattholt was run as a joint farm from then on. Commercial farming there ended in 2000, when the hotel went up. I went to grammar school with Jón Harrý and with his brother Svavar Njarðarson.

The toilet nobody would approve

There is one thing in Njörður’s story that deserves to be far better known.

When the family took over at the end of the 1970s, there was no visitor service at Gullfoss whatsoever. No shop, no café — not a lavatory. Nothing at all. People came from the other side of the world to a site that offered them, on arrival, nothing.

Njörður spent years trying to get a service area at Gullfoss planned and approved. The record of it is largely a record of getting nowhere: proposals that died, and very little understanding of what he was arguing for, more or less wherever he took it.

He was proved right in the most complete way available. The thing exists, and every single person uses it.

Two businesses, one lineage

Gullfosskaffi, at the falls, was established in 1996 by Svavar Njarðarson and his wife Elfa Björk Magnúsdóttir. It began as a tent beside Sigríðarstofa, serving coffee and homemade soup through the summer. It is now a restaurant, a shop and a viewing terrace, and it is the stop for the large majority of everyone who ever sees Gullfoss. Njörður was a founder of it alongside his son.

Hótel Gullfoss stands at Brattholt on the bank of the Hvítá. It opened in 2000 and is run within the family.

So the two buildings that shape almost every visitor’s experience of Gullfoss were built by the sons of a man who moved onto that farm to raise sheep and horses, and who spent his first years there arguing with planning authorities about lavatories.

Stand at Gullfoss today and the obvious reading is: natural wonder, with commercial infrastructure bolted on. Waterfall on one side of the line, car park and restaurant on the other.

That reading is wrong, and it is wrong in a specific way.

The path down was cut by three farm women for a king, in the same year the falls were leased out from under them. The ground you stand on was given away, not taken. The building you buy soup in was fought for over years by a farmer nobody would listen to, and it stands beside a room named for the household that fought the lease. The man at the till is his son. Two kilometres downstream there is a hill called London, because someone thought it was funny in about 1830 and nobody has ever stopped.

And on that farm’s own water, within my lifetime, the river was let out for fishing under an agreement whose entire documentation was two men and a handshake.

There is no line between the wilderness and the infrastructure. It is one community, over four generations, doing what it has always done — finding a way to accommodate the people who keep arriving to look at the river.

Sigríður lost her court case. What she achieved instead was to make Gullfoss something that could not be quietly disposed of. The generations after her did the unglamorous part: the land gifts, the planning battles, the car park, the toilets. That is why you can stand there at all.

For anyone writing about Gullfoss, or checking something read elsewhere.

Sigríður won her case and had the contract annulled. She did not. The judgment went against Brattholt. Payments stopped in 1928 and the lease was struck off in 1934.

Tómas owned Gullfoss. He owned half. The rest lay with the landowners on the eastern bank.

Gullfoss was sold to a foreign company. It was never sold in that period. It was leased, for 150 years.

Einar Guðmundsson was Sigríður’s brother, or her son. Neither. He was a foster child raised at Brattholt, born in 1904, and he bought the farm from her in 1939.

The state bought Gullfoss in 1975. The state purchased it in 1945. The transfers of 1974 and 1976 were gifts of adjoining land from Einar.

State ownership made the falls safe. The state itself studied diversion schemes from the 1950s into the 1970s.

She walked barefoot to Reykjavík. The journeys are documented. The barefoot detail is contested, and horseback is considered likelier.

Sigríður was born in 1874. She was born on 24 February 1871.

Was Gullfoss ever nearly dammed? Yes, twice over. A 150-year lease signed in 1907 was intended to lead to a hydroelectric scheme, and it lapsed only because the money was never raised. Then, after the state bought the falls in 1945, official proposals to divert water above them were studied from the 1950s into the 1970s.

Where is Brattholt farm? On the western bank of the Hvítá, two to three kilometres below Gullfoss. It is the last farm you pass on the road up to the waterfall. Hótel Gullfoss stands on the farm today.

When was Gullfoss protected? In 1979, as a natural monument. Protection came seventy-two years after the first offer to buy the falls.

Can you see the memorial to Sigríður Tómasdóttir? Yes. It stands above the falls, carved by Ríkarður Jónsson and raised in 1978 by the Árnesingar society, the education ministry and the federation of South Iceland women’s associations.

Did Sigríður really walk barefoot to Reykjavík? The journeys themselves are well documented. The barefoot detail is contested, and travel on horseback is considered more likely.

What does the name Gullfoss mean? Golden falls. The most common explanation is the colour the spray takes in low sun.

Umhverfisstofnun — Gullfoss: Menning og saga, Um svæðið, Náttúra og jarðfræði and the English summary. Sigríður’s dates, the 1907 offer and refusal, the 1907 law, the 1939 sale, the 1945 state purchase, the 1974 gift, the December 1976 handover and the 1979 protection.

Menntamálastofnun, Sigríður og Einar í Brattholti. The sisters’ path cut for the King’s visit of 1907, the fire and its aftermath, the Alþingi grant of 1953, the new house in 1954, Sigríður’s death in Hafnarfjörður in 1957, and Einar’s birth and fosterage.

Örnefnaskrá, Brattholt, Biskupstungnahreppur — Örnefnastofnun. Informant Einar Guðmundsson, Brattholti, recorded 20 September 1963 by Gunnar Karlsson frá Gýgjarhólskoti. Source for Lundún, París, Parísarleynir, Rómaborg and Uppsalir, and for Einar’s attribution of the naming custom to Guðni Runólfsson.

Eyrún Ingadóttir, “Sigríður í Brattholti og Gullfoss”, Morgunblaðið, 2002. The six-year case, the judgment against Brattholt and the timing of the threat.

Obituary of Njörður Marel Jónsson, Morgunblaðið, 2017. The farming chronology, the 1978 arrival at Brattholt, Jón Harrý joining in 1990, farming ending in 2000, the service-area campaign and Perla frá Brattholti.

Unnur Birna Karlsdóttir, “Gulls ígildi”, Skírnir, autumn 2005, vol. 179, pp. 237–278.

Accounts of the Kóngsvegur and the royal visit of 1907, including the landing on 30 July, the departure on 1 August, the retinue of around two hundred, the route via Þingvellir, Laugarvatn, Geysir and Gullfoss with the new bridge at Brúarhlöð, and the road’s cost as a share of national output.

Veiðistaðavefurinn, Landssamband veiðifélaga and the Morgunblaðið angling archive. Hvítá hydrology, the fishery, and the 1946 Iða and 1952 Brúará records.

The skinnbækur, and the naming custom as it was known in the district, are local knowledge from the author.