Kolaportid Flea Market

Kolaportid is the country's largest and oldest flea market, running every Saturday and Sunday from 11 to 5 in a warehouse on the old harbour beside Harpa concert hall. It has been going since 1989 and is where Reykjavikers offload the lopapeysa jumpers their grandmother knitted, stacks of vinyl, second-hand books, Icelandic sweets and jewellery. It is scruffy, warm and utterly unfiltered — a completely different Reykjavik from the design shops of Laugavegur, and one of the few places where you can still find a real hand-knitted jumper for a fraction of retail.

The layout has two halves. The main hall is textile-heavy: wool, sheepskin, second-hand clothes, LP crates, plus stalls of Icelandic candy and licorice. The smaller food section has fresh and dried fish, harkl (fermented shark) in cubes for the brave, ryebread, smoked lamb and rye-bread ice-cream sandwiches. Try harkl with a shot of Brennivin from the stall that runs it — it will not be pleasant but is a Reykjavik rite of passage. Cash still moves but almost every stall now takes card.

Come early Saturday for the freshest offerings and best jumper picks; by Sunday afternoon stalls start packing up around 4pm. It closes over Christmas and Easter weekends. Pair with a walk along the Old Harbour, a whale-watching trip from the same pier, or lunch at the harbour restaurants. Prices on jumpers vary wildly — expect ISK25000-40000 for a real hand-knit lopapeysa. Ask the seller who knitted it; the answer is often their aunt in Akureyri.

The building itself is part of the story. This is the ground floor of Tollhusid, the old customs house at Tryggvagata 19, and the name Kolaportid comes from the coal quay that stood here when ships still unloaded fuel onto this stretch of waterfront. On the Tryggvagata facade above the entrance is Gerdur Helgadottir's huge glass mosaic of harbour work and fishing boats, finished in the 1970s and worth two minutes of your attention before you go in — most visitors walk straight under it. Inside there is no architecture to speak of: strip lighting, concrete floor, folding tables. Tables are rented week by week, mostly by private individuals rather than businesses, which is why the stock is completely different from one Saturday to the next. If you saw something last weekend and came back for it, assume it is gone.

Getting here needs no planning. From Laekjartorg, the central bus interchange where lines 1, 3, 6, 11, 12, 13 and 14 all pass, it is a flat five-minute walk down Hafnarstraeti and Tryggvagata with no hills involved. Straeto 12 and 14 stop right by Harpa, about 100 m from the door, and a single adult fare sits around ISK700, bought most easily in the Klapp app because drivers give no change. Drivers of hire cars should know that Reykjavik street parking is free all day Sunday and charged only until 16:00 on Saturdays in the central zones, so a Sunday visit costs nothing to park; if the harbour bays are full, the Harpa underground car park is a two-minute walk and charges by the hour. Honestly, though: walk. Every downtown hotel is inside 15 minutes.

Costs are entirely up to you. There is no ticket desk, no turnstile and no cloakroom charge, and the toilets are free. Second-hand and machine-knit jumpers typically run ISK8000-15000, mittens and hats ISK3000-6000, sheepskins ISK10000-20000, LPs mostly ISK1000-3000 with the odd collectable Icelandic pressing far higher, and paperbacks a few hundred ISK each. In the food section, budget roughly ISK1500-2500 for a tub of harkl, a similar figure for a bag of hardfiskur, ISK500-1500 for licorice or salted-liquorice chocolate, and under ISK1000 for a rye-bread ice-cream sandwich. Grazing your way through the food end without buying wool costs about ISK5000. One thing to accept in advance: private sellers cannot issue tax-free forms, so the VAT refund you would get on Laugavegur does not exist here — the prices simply start lower.

Timing matters more than the day. Doors open at 11:00 and the first 90 minutes are the calm, browsable window, with the best jumper and vinyl stock still on the tables; between roughly 13:00 and 15:00 the aisles genuinely clog and you shuffle rather than shop. Saturday has the fullest set of stalls and the freshest fish; Sunday runs the same hours on paper but sellers begin folding down from 16:00, so arriving at 16:30 gets you an empty hall. It is closed Monday to Friday, which trips up more visitors than anything else about the place. Winter is when Kolaportid earns its keep — it is indoors, heated and the single best answer to a horizontal-rain Reykjavik afternoon — and the December weekends before Christmas are the busiest and best for second-hand books.

It suits some travellers far better than others. Families do well: children have candy stalls, ice cream and a floor they cannot break, and an hour here is cheaper than any museum. Teenagers head straight for the LP crates and the second-hand rails. Wheelchair users get level, step-free access straight off Tryggvagata onto one flat concrete floor, though the textile rows narrow badly at peak hours, so come at 11:00 rather than 14:00. It also slots neatly into a one-hour gap before a whale-watching departure or an airport transfer. Skip it if you want curated vintage, polished Icelandic design or antiques with provenance — the design shops on Skolavordustigur and the Rauda Kross charity shops do those jobs properly, and you will leave here disappointed if that is your list.

Everything else worth doing is within a few minutes. Harpa is two minutes east and free to walk into for the harbour-facing glass and the upper balconies. Reykjavik Art Museum Hafnarhus is on the same street, two minutes west, and its ticket also covers Kjarvalsstadir and Asmundarsafn on the same day. The Baejarins Beztu hot dog kiosk is three minutes away on Tryggvagata; the Old Harbour piers where Elding and the other whale-watching boats leave are seven minutes; the Sun Voyager sculpture is about ten along the shore path; the Settlement Exhibition on Adalstraeti is seven; and Grandi with the Marshall House galleries is a twenty-minute waterfront walk. For a base, Radisson Blu 1919 Hotel Reykjavik and Center Hotels Arnarhvoll are five to six minutes away, and Reykjavik Marina Berjaya Iceland Hotels sits eight minutes along the harbour.

The honest caveats. Plenty of what is on the textile tables is ordinary used clothing, and some souvenir stalls sell factory jumpers with Icelandic patterns that were never knitted by anyone's aunt — check for a hand-finished neckline, slightly uneven stitching and a seller who can tell you where the wool came from. Haggling barely exists in Iceland; expect a modest reduction on two or three items together, not a bazaar negotiation, and pushing hard reads as rude. The harkl is genuinely foul rather than amusingly foul, so take the free toothpick sample and let that be enough. And keep the scale in proportion: this is one warehouse hall you can cover in an hour, not a day out, so pair it with the harbour rather than building a morning around it.

Hours & entry

Always free to enter

Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00 only · Closed Mon-Fri · Closed public holidays

What to see

• Hand-knitted lopapeysa jumper stall — Main hall, along the west wall
• Harkl fermented shark counter — Food section at the north end
• Icelandic sweets and licorice — Central aisle between textile and food sections

Tips from the ground

• Come Saturday before 1pm for the best jumper selection
• Bring cash for negotiation, though most stalls now take card
• Try harkl with the free toothpick sample before you commit to a bag