Ísafjörður

The largest settlement in the Westfjords, about 2,600 people on a sand spit in Skutulsfjörður where it meets the larger Ísafjarðardjúp. Landnámabók gives Helgi Magri Hrólfsson as the first settler in the ninth century; the town grew in the sixteenth as a trading post for foreign merchants, and got municipal status in 1786. Witch trials ran through the Westfjords in the same period, with many people banished to Hornstrandir. The old Danish trading post of Neðstikaupstaður holds the oldest collection of timber-frame houses in Iceland, including Krambúð of 1757 and Tjöruhúsið of 1781.