[Sponsored post] Every explorer needs a portal. For Professor Otto Lidenbrock, the eccentric hero of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, it was the glacier-capped Snæfellsjökull volcano in Iceland—the place where, in his 1864 novel, the protagonists find the entrance to a passage leading to Earth’s very core. Verne never set foot in Iceland. But his imagination traveled there with the certainty of someone who understood that Iceland was unlike anywhere else. A place where the planet makes itself visible and where fire pushes through ice.
A Land that Called to French Curiosities
In other words, Iceland is a place that has always called to French curiosities.
Decades before Verne put pen to paper, a French naval surgeon and naturalist named Paul Gaimard had already made Iceland a focus of his work. Gaimard came to Iceland almost by chance in 1835, when he participated in the search for a French ship that had disappeared between Iceland and Greenland. What he found changed the course of his career. He and geologist Eugène Robert explored the entire island—visiting Reykjavík, then little more than a fishing village, as well as the fjords and the volcanic interior. They made the ascent of Snæfellsjökull, the 700,000-year-old volcano that Verne would later immortalize—climbed first by a French scientist, then descended, through imagination, by a French novelist.
Gaimard’s findings so impressed the French government that a second, larger expedition was dispatched the following year, and then two more. In all, Gaimard led four expeditions to the European North, including ones in Lapland, Spitsbergen, and the Faroe Islands, producing eight volumes of research on botany, geology, ethnology, meteorology, and literature. The French scientific gaze had found its northern object, and held it with steadfast interest.
That same pull—toward the unknown and dramatic—resurfaced more than a century later in the waters near the Westman Islands, just off Iceland’s south coast. In November 1963, a volcanic eruption broke the surface of the Atlantic and birthed an entirely new island, eventually named Surtsey. The world took notice.
In pursuit of a sensational story, a trio from Paris Match—reporter Gérard Géry, mountaineer Pierre Mazeaud, and photographer Philippe Laffon—navigated a Zodiac to the still-smoldering black sands and became the first people to set foot on the newborn island. They were there barely fifteen minutes before the volcano forced them back, but the local Icelandic press had already taken to calling Surtsey “the island of the French.”
2027 Iceland Itineraries
Today, Surtsey is a protected scientific research site accessible only to scientists. But the Westman Islands themselves—including Heimaey, home to the largest puffin colony in the world—are explored on several itineraries with PONANT EXPLORATIONS, including the 11-day Wild Islands of Scotland, the Faroe Islands and Iceland, the 8-day Iceland Mosaic, as well as an 8-day Iceland: Land of Fire and Ice sailing with Smithsonian Journeys.
Both the Iceland Mosaic and Iceland: Land of Fire and Ice sailings follow the western coast of Iceland, passing through Grundarfjörður, a bay on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula where Verne’s fictional volcano looms not far off, and where Gaimard himself once stood at the summit of the glacier above. Icelandic folklore holds that the mountain is home to a powerful guardian spirit who watches over the land, and for those who sail into Grundarfjörður beneath its glacier-covered peak, the sense of arriving at the threshold of something ancient and enormous is awe-inspiring.
From Grundarfjörður, the voyage continues north to Grímsey, a remote island where seabirds reign on basalt columns that rise from the sea. Akureyri follows, offering an excursion to Godafoss—the Waterfall of the Gods, so named for the moment an Icelandic lawspeaker threw his Norse pagan idols into its torrent upon Iceland’s conversion to Christianity in the year 1000. Then it’s on to Ísafjörður, the remote capital of the Westfjords—Iceland’s oldest landscape of dramatic fjords and sheer cliffs.
Another itinerary, From Svalbard to Iceland: A Polar Odyssey, approaches Iceland from the north, descending from the High Arctic through Spitsbergen, touching Greenland’s east coast, and passing through Scoresby Sound, the world’s largest fjord network, before arriving at Húsavík and Grundarfjörður on the way into Reykjavík. It is a voyage that reveals Iceland by approaching it the way the earliest explorers did: from the ice.
A Rare Phenomenon
Total Solar Eclipse: August 2026
Iceland has always been a draw for those who wish to witness something extraordinary. And in August 2026, two PONANT EXPLORATIONS voyages offer an experience of a different order entirely—a total solar eclipse, with French astronauts Jean-François Clervoy, Claudie Haigneré, and Jean-Pierre Haigneré joining the sailings. Few experiences can offer what these sailings do: a moment of total darkness in the high north, witnessed from the deck of a ship, in the company of people who have seen our planet from space.
A French Fleet
Any exploration of Iceland demands a certain kind of ship, and PONANT EXPLORATIONS‘ small French-flagged vessels are designed for these latitudes, carrying expedition expertise and French refinement in equal measure. Champagne at the end of a day in the Westfjords. Cuisine curated in partnership with Ducasse Conseil as glaciers give way to open water. The Blue Eye underwater lounge, where the sounds of the sea come through the hull.
Verne understood what Gaimard discovered, and what the journalists of Paris Match experienced: Iceland rewards those bold enough to explore it. It is volcanic, vertiginous, and astonishing—a place that has been drawing French curiosity for centuries, and offering something extraordinary in return. PONANT EXPLORATIONS is the most elegant way to make the discovery.
Let PONANT EXPLORATIONS be your portal to Iceland. Explore 2026 and 2027 Iceland journeys at us.ponant.com or call 1-888-400-1082.
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