Reykjavík, Island

Reykjavík's defining characteristic for a visitor is not what is in it but what leaves from it. The great majority of excursions into the south and west of the country are organised as day trips out of the city and back, which means the practical question when planning is rarely which neighbourhood to stay in — the centre is small enough that this barely matters — but how many days you intend to spend leaving it. Pick-ups for organised trips commonly work from designated stops around the centre rather than from individual accommodation, so staying within walking distance of the downtown core is worth more than any particular street. The corollary is that a first or last night here is seldom wasted even on an itinerary that is mostly elsewhere, because the airport road and most departure points run through the same few kilometres.

Given a day of its own rather than a night between drives, Reykjavík rewards more than its size suggests. Harpa, the concert hall on the harbour front, is wrapped in a honeycomb of glass cells that pick up and throw back the changing light off the water, and it is worth walking into even with no ticket. The Sun Voyager, a steel skeleton of a ship on the shoreline path, is the city's most photographed sculpture and reads best in low sun. The Settlement Exhibition is built around a Viking-age longhouse wall discovered during construction and left exactly where it was found, below current street level, which makes the point about the city's age more effectively than any display case. Grandi, the old fishing district out past the harbour, has become the part of town where the conversions — food halls, workshops, small museums — are most concentrated.

Reykjavík's municipal pools — Sundhöllin downtown, the large Laugardalslaug in the park, and Vesturbæjarlaug in the west of the city — are where the ordinary social life of the place happens. The lanes are incidental; the point is the hot pots around the edges, where people sit and talk before work, after school and for most of a weekend morning, in any weather and at any time of year. Going to one is the cheapest and most direct way for a visitor to spend an hour inside everyday Icelandic life rather than looking at it, and each of the three has a distinct regular crowd. Bring a swimsuit and a towel, and expect the changing-room routine to be taken seriously.