Akranes Museum Center

Garðar

About

Iceland has many small-town folk museums. While this is one of the better and larger ones, it's typically hit or miss. In the Icelandic Sport Museum, one of several installations in the museum complex, you'll find entertaining artifacts such as a bike hand-twisted by Jón Páll Sigmarsson, Iceland's three-time winner of the "World's Strongest Man" competition. You'll also find some track star's stinky old sneakers, exhibited in all earnestness. Even better than the extensive rock and mineral collection is the cartography exhibit, which has good English captions explaining the old surveying equipment and the personalities of all the sea monsters on 17th-century maps. Several old fishing vessels lie outside on the lawn.