Árbær Open Air Museum
Open-air museum around an old farmstead, with more than twenty relocated Reykjavík houses and a turf church.
Árbær Open Air Museum grew out of the old farm of Árbær, on the edge of the Elliðaá valley, which was worked until the middle of the twentieth century and also served travellers heading into Reykjavík. The museum opened in 1957 to save buildings that were being cleared from the growing city. Timber houses, turf structures and workshops were dismantled and re-erected around a village green, so that the site now holds more than twenty buildings of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since 2014 it has formed part of Reykjavík City Museum.
Rooms are furnished to particular decades rather than as a single period piece, so visitors move from a 1925 household at Suðurgata 7 to a working-class home of about 1950 and a corner shop. Other displays cover schooling in Reykjavík between 1898 and 1974, patterns of consumption in the twentieth century, and the development of house building in the capital from 1840 to 1940. A reconstructed turf church, consecrated in 1960, stands on the site, and domestic animals and craft demonstrations appear in the summer months.
Highlights
- More than twenty historic buildings moved here from central Reykjavík
- Turf church reconstruction consecrated in 1960
- Interiors furnished to the 1920s, 1950s and other decades
- Daily guided tour in English, included with admission
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