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Iceland Iceland is a country of full contrasts, surprises and secrets. In this archaistic volcanic landscape one feels transferred into the primeval times of the earth emergence. The earth's crust is dangerously thin in some places, and the bubbling, steaming holes grant the view in the inside of our still glowing planet. But which for humans in the Middle Ages only threatening and strange was, which they explained themselves as devil work and entrance as hell, knows the Islander of today very well. The lava serves as building material, the earth energy into river is converted, and the hot water warms houses and swimming pools. The Islander learned to dance on the volcano. The wealth of the country is its nature, on whose basis humans live here. Apart from the energy there is above all the fish grounds within the hard fought 200-Mile-Zone, which represent the economic basis, and which are accordingly carefully fished. Above all it is the variety of the landscape, which atracts thousands of tourists annually. In the south you will find expanded pastures with broad, black beaches, at which the white waves breaks, and besides enormous glaciers, whose black tongues are near to the sea. In the east the steep basalt plateaus rise up, into which deep fjords and close mountain valleys dug themselves. In the north you see broad valleys and the longest fjord of the country, the Eyjafjoeršur. The northwest is a coastal landscape with a many fjords from which humans withdrew themselves. Still today it comes there during the hard winters frequently to avalanches, which block the road in the most favourable case only. The high country is far Lava-and rubble desert, a life-rejecting and dead moon landscape with lonely standing mountains and hills. In addition hundreds of waterfalls: hidden, thundering, powerful and beautiful, some with stories and other one so small that you are perhaps the first to discover. All that is united on an island, hardly larger than Switzerland, whose next neighbours are Greenland (300 km) and the Faeroe Islands (500 km). |
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Pictures from this European country can be
found here
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