Swimming pools: one of the main hobbies in Iceland

"Landep News"

How do you identify a swimming pool or bathing area? In most places the best known symbol is that of a person in horizontal position, swimming crawl. Nevertheless, in Iceland, the sign for a swimming pool often shows a person sitting in the water. This is not casual: most people in Iceland enjoy taking baths in the swimming pools, sitting and chatting in warm water.

Swimming pools in Iceland are usually outdoors, and they are heated with natural spring waters coming from the mountains. There are 13 different swimming pool complexes in Reykjavik, which is a lot for the size of the city. On Friday morning we woke up early to visit the favorite swimming pool of our friend Una: Laugardalslaug.

Located a short 10-minute drive from the city center, Laugardalslaug is a big swimming and bathing complex also attached to a gym. You can have a membership for a monthly fee but, when doing tourism in Iceland, you can always just go and pay for a day pass, which as of August 2011 costs 450 kr (less than 3 euros).

To go to the swimming pool you will need a swimsuit, a towel and your hair cleaning products. Soap and hair driers are available in the locker rooms. You have to take off your shoes to enter the locker rooms, and shower thoroughly with soap, and without wearing your swimsuit, before entering the bathing areas. Most of the showers are in common areas, with no separating curtains, but there are a couple of showers with curtains available for those who are shy.

There are a couple of big but not deep swimming pools, with warm water for you to just sit and rest. One of these pools also has a great slide, which is a lot of fun to try! Hint: try to stick your swimsuit up your butt and you will slide a lot faster.

There is also a 50-meter long pool for swimming laps, which is slightly colder. Around this pool are small Jacuzzis at different temperatures, ranging from 38 to 44 Celsius. There is one pool with salty water, one steam bath and one pool known as “the plate”, with shallow waters and which is especially popular in sunny days.

Once you are done swimming, you can go back in the locker facilities, take a shower and use a machine to quick-dry your swimsuit (not completely, but you can get most of the water out of it). Outside, there is a small cafeteria for you to grab a bite or recover energies with a drink before leaving the complex.

A short walk from the pool we passed by a very crowded camping area and one of the youth hostels. Even when not really in the city, this hostel offers bike rental, and you can reach the city center in a 10 to 15 minute bike ride.

From the camping area, it’s just a few hundred meters to Thvottalaugarnar or “the laundry pools”. In the past, and especially at times when there were shortages in energy and in the availability of heated water, women used to walk to this area from Reykjavik to do their laundry for their families, benefiting from the naturally hot water available. There are a set of plaques explaining how they would do it, the utensils they would use and what their lives were like. Later on the government added a transportation service for women not to have to walk all the way there, encouraging the consumption of the naturally heated water.

Having seen this area, we left the pool complex area and drove to our next destination. We still had a lot more planned for this day.

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