On the shore path by Höfði, a walkway with yellow railings runs out to a round concrete platform, and on the platform stands a squat, corrugated, gloriously yellow lighthouse. It has a lantern room, a gallery rail and a pointed cap, everything a proper harbour light is supposed to have, and it looks for all the world like it has stood there guiding boats for a century. It has not. It was built in 2019.
That is not a scandal, it is the whole idea. When the city extended the shore by Höfði with a new landfill and a viewing platform, the architects at Yrki Arkitektar chose to crown it with a lighthouse built to the pattern of the channel lights raised in Reykjavík’s old harbour between 1913 and 1917, the little corrugated iron towers that still stand yellow on the breakwaters today. The new tower is a deliberate echo of them, a copy made with love.
A lighthouse built in the age of satellites has no ships to save, and this one does not pretend to. Its job is memory. Reykjavík began as a harbour town and the working port made the modern city possible, and as the shoreline fills with glass offices and hotels, a bright yellow tower on the water is the city keeping its own origin in view. It guides nothing but attention.
It also completes a small family. Walk the shore west and you reach the original it quotes, the yellow lighthouse at the end of Ingólfsgarður at the old harbour mouth, the one the boats actually steer by. One is a working light from 1917 and the other is its portrait from 2019, and they stand a half hour’s walk apart, bookending the harbour like a rhyme.
The spot it stands on has become one of the densest stretches of the whole shore walk. Within a few hundred metres you have Höfði itself, the poet Einar Benediktsson, Sigurjón Ólafsson’s copper high seat pillars, and the painted slab of the Berlin Wall. The little lighthouse is the youngest thing on that lawn by about a century, and photographs like the oldest.
It earns its place on a card honestly: the yellow burns against the grey sea, Esja lies flat across the bay behind it, and the walkway with its yellow rails leads the eye straight to the door. In low evening sun the whole platform goes gold. No filter required, which around here is a matter of principle.
Sign a photograph of it for the person who is your fixed point, the one you steer by when the weather turns, and the card says what every lighthouse says, only in a friendlier shade of yellow: I am here, you will find your way.