According to Bloomberg, the Icelandic Krona since the end of March rose 4% against the Euro and 6.4% against the dollar. Intelligence sources suggest that the sharp growth of the tourism sector of Iceland in connection with the people’s interest in the country due to filming popular television series “Game of thrones”.
Member of the Supervisory Board of the Bank of Iceland Olafur Margeirsson compared my country with Portugal. “Many people say about the tourist boom in Portugal, where 10 million people have 40 million tourists, that is, four times more. While in Iceland seven times more tourists than local residents,” he said.
According to the authorities of Iceland, and only in 2016 the country was visited by 2.4 million people with a population of 334 thousand.
As pointed out by Newsweek, the arrival of tourists has forced the authorities to seriously address the development of infrastructure in sparsely populated areas of the country where the authorities can’t cope with the influx of tourists. For example, we are talking about creation of comfortable conditions of stay and medical assistance to tourists who have decided to go on a boat trip on lake Myvatn. The last film is set in the lands located behind the wall in the North of the fictional state.
Margeirsson stressed that the influx of tourists after the release of the series has allowed Iceland partly to cope with the effects of the financial crisis of 2008, when the collapse of local banks led to the fall of the stock market by 80% in just one day.
As he told the Telegraph newspaper in 2016, the head of one of local travel agencies Jon tor Benediktsson, the usual tour of the filming locations includes a visit to lake Myvatn and also shows in the third season covered by lava field Dimmuborgir, cave Grjotagja, which was the date of John snow and Ygritte and the waterfall Gullfoss. The latter film is not shown, although the shooting was held there. While Benediktsson told that tourists often wear animal skins, and sometimes wonder why not meet in the North of Iceland wild tribes.
In the country of “Game of thrones”: how to engage the traveler in Iceland
The series premiere of “Game of thrones” took place in April 2011 on HBO in the United States. This year should go for the seventh season, but only HBO has promised viewers a film in fantasy style eight seasons.
Apart from Iceland, the shooting took place in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Morocco, Croatia, and Malta.
