Grettir's Pool — Grettislaug

Iceland's most famous outlaw swam six kilometres through the arctic sea to reach this hot spring — and it's still open to swim in today.

Grettislaug is a natural hot spring at Reykir, on the north coast of Iceland facing the island of Drangey, named for Grettir Ásmundarson, the outlaw hero of Grettis Saga and one of the most enduring figures in Icelandic literature. Grettir spent the final years of his life as a fugitive hiding on Drangey, a steep, near-inaccessible sea stack island that offered him relative safety from the men hunting him under Iceland's outlawry laws. According to the saga, when the fire on Drangey went out and could not be relit, Grettir swam across the open sea to the mainland — a distance of roughly six kilometres through cold North Atlantic water — to fetch embers and bring the flame back, an act of endurance the saga treats as legendary even by its own standards. Tradition holds that Grettir came ashore at Reykir and warmed himself in the hot spring there before making the return swim, and the pool has carried his name ever since. The saga's account of the swim itself is treated by scholars as at least loosely plausible — cold-water endurance swimming of comparable distances has been documented in modern times — which has helped keep the story anchored somewhere between legend and remembered history rather than pure invention. The spring survives as a functioning, low-key bathing pool, maintained rather than fenced off as a monument, and visitors can still swim in the same water Grettir is said to have used nearly a thousand years ago, with a clear view across the water to Drangey where his exile played out.