Foto

This is the old French Hospital by Fáskrúðsfjörður, East -Iceland. The hospital was built for French fishermen from Normandy, who every summer sailed up to Iceland for fishing cod. It was built in 1903-1904 but was moved to Hafnarnes in 1940 to serce as an apartment house until the eighties.
(thanks to Mdetay for the useful hint and the exact identification of the building)

In background the Skrudur Island. Skrudur rises steeply out of the sea just east of the Faskrudsfiord Bay. Two flat and small islets are closer to land, The Duck Islet and The Eider Islet. The island Papey, the largest off the east coast, is the only one that was constantly inhabited until it was abandoned around the middle of the 20th century. On the island Skrudur is a large cave where fishermen stayed during the fishing seasons. People collected eggs and hunted birds every year on the island and still do. The lush vegetation, which hardly looses its green colour during winter, is richly fertilized by the myriad of birds nesting there.
The farmers used to ferry some of their sheep over to the island during summer to graze them there. Somehow, they never seemed to find all of them again in autumn and blamed a mythological being for their disappearance. They even went so far as to ask one of the catholic bishops at Holar in the North to come and drive it away from the island. The bishop never found time for this task. One of the stories about this being, or the farmer of Skrudur, as it was more commonly called, tells us about how great a help it was to people in need, such as shipwrecked fishermen.