Hotel Ranga

This ranch-style hotel is perfectly located, and your best option, for exploring southwest Iceland.

There are seven bizarre but dazzling suites, taking the world’s continents as their themes and containing items from them all – apart from the Antarctica Suite, which is black and white like a penguin. Weird but wonderful.

There’s also an excellent restaurant in-house, serving locally-sourced food inspired by Nordic cuisine. The menu features plenty of Icelandic specialities, including smoked puffin (which tastes a bit like duck), Icelandic lamb, langoustines and skyr (a type of natural yoghurt) cheesecake. The salmon river provides wonderful fish too.

Located miles from anywhere, it’s a great spot for stargazing. The hotel has set up a special ‘observatory’ with a couple of high powered telescopes, and from September to April, on clear nights, a local astronomer visits to give talks about the stars, explaining the various constellations.

With Iceland being in the Aurora Belt, it’s also one of the best places in the world to see the Northern Lights in all their glory (when they decide to appear – most often between September and April). Stay for at least four nights to give yourself the best chance of seeing them.­ NB The hot tubs are perfectly placed for midnight dips and views of the Northern Lights.