TWO BRIDES ON REYKJANESGlóþór & Sólveig

Glóþór and Sólveig got married on the Reykjanes peninsula, two brides in white against roughly a hundred shades of black.

Reykjanes is the steaming, half-finished corner of Iceland that most people land in and drive straight out of, on the way to somewhere greener. Most of them miss something. It is all lava fields, geothermal steam and small, improbably blue crater lakes, a landscape that looks about four days old. On a grey afternoon it belongs to whoever bothers to stop, and that afternoon it was theirs.

Iceland made same-sex marriage law in 2010, and had the world’s first openly gay head of government the year before that. Eloping here still feels like the country means it. Nobody blinked, nobody made it a thing. Glóþór and Sólveig put on their dresses and went out into the lava, and the rain, for once, mostly stayed off.

Reykjanes

They started on the coast, where the black lava runs straight down into the sea.

The blue lakes

Inland, the crater lakes come in a blue so bright it looks dyed.

The black church

There is a small black church out on the peninsula, and they walked out to it as the light went flat.

The steam

Then the ground started steaming. Reykjanes sits on the ridge where two continents are slowly pulling apart, so the earth here leaks heat: hissing vents, orange mud, whole hillsides gone the colour of rust. Walking two people in wedding dresses through it is faintly post-apocalyptic, in the best way.

No aisle, no seating plan, no hundred people to feed. Just the two of them and the whole strange, beautiful peninsula to themselves. If a gay elopement in Iceland sounds more like your kind of day than a ballroom full of relatives, this is one of the great places on earth to do it. Bring someone you would cross a lava field for.