Iceland
Iceland is a Nordic island country in the North Atlantic, lying on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge about 800 km from Scotland. Norse settlers arrived in the Viking Age — the first permanent settler, Ingólfr Arnarson, is dated to 874 — and by 930 a general assembly, the Althing, was meeting at Þingvellir, a site now inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The island's volcanic geology shapes everything from its glaciers and geysers to its geothermal economy: it sits atop a plate boundary, contains about 200 volcanoes, and has been shaped by eruptions from Hekla to Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 and the Reykjanes peninsula eruptions of the 2020s. Under Norwegian and then Danish rule for centuries, Iceland won home rule in 1874 and full independence with the founding of the republic at Þingvellir on 17 June 1944. Today its economy — fishing, aluminium smelting, geothermal energy and tourism — has been rebuilt since the 2008 banking collapse; provisional national accounts put GDP at 4,956 billion ISK in 2025, when the economy grew 1.3 percent, while the population reached 396,500 by the middle of 2026.