The Icelandic Festival in Gimli: our notes on the August long weekend

Íslendingadagurinn, the Icelandic Festival of Manitoba, takes over the lakeside town of Gimli every August long weekend. Four days, Friday to the Monday holiday. The 2026 edition was the 137th, ran July 31 to August 3 under the theme Interconnected Shores, and brought dignitaries over from Iceland as it usually does. In 2027 the holiday Monday falls on August 2, so the weekend lands at the end of July again. The organiser posts the year's dates and schedule at icelandicfestival.com.

We have driven up for this one more times than we have counted, usually for the Sunday or the Monday rather than the whole run. These are the notes we give guests who ask whether the drive pays off, which it does, with a couple of caveats about the day.

What the festival actually is, under the Viking costumes

Gimli was the centre of New Iceland, the block of land on the west shore of Lake Winnipeg that Icelandic settlers were granted in 1875, and the festival has run since the 1890s. It reads less like a themed event and more like a town's own anniversary that visitors are welcome at. There are Viking re-enactors and a staged battle, and there are also free stages at the harbour and in Gimli Park, a strongman competition and running races.

The Monday morning program in Gimli Park is the formal heart of it: the Fjallkona, the Lady of the Mountain, appears in Icelandic national dress and brings greetings, and the Toast to Canada is presented. If you only come for one thing, that is a fair candidate, and it is the part that most feels like it belongs to the people who live there.

The drive up Highway 8

Gimli sits about ninety kilometres north of Winnipeg, which is an hour to an hour and a quarter in normal summer conditions. Highway 8 is the direct route; it starts at the city's north limit where McPhillips Street ends and runs north through Winnipeg Beach to Gimli and on toward Hecla. The posted limit is 100. Highway 9 and Highway 7 both reach it as well, which matters on the Sunday and Monday of a long weekend.

No city bus runs out to Gimli, so this is a car day. Leave earlier than feels necessary on parade morning. The walk in from wherever you end up parking is part of the trip.

The two events we plan the day around

Íslendingadunk is the one guests remember. Two competitors sit on a greased pole over the water at Gimli Harbour and swing a sack with a wet sponge inside it at each other until one of them goes in. It is daft and it is the best thing we have watched there. In recent years it has run on the Sunday afternoon at the harbour, with competitors registering beforehand.

The parade is the other. In past years it has stepped off at ten on the Monday morning from the Gimli Rec Centre, with entries registering an hour earlier. If you want a spot where you can actually see, be standing an hour before that, and accept that you are then committed to the morning. The running races, the ten mile, the five kilometre and the one mile, have been held on the Sunday, which is a reason to come up for both days if you are the running sort.

What costs money

Much of what happens is out in the open, at Gimli Park and along the harbour, and the organiser decides each year which events are ticketed. For the 2026 festival it sold an Odin's Festival Pass at $99, which carried priority seating at some events and skip-the-line entry to the Vingólf beverage garden along with a few drink tickets. Passes were collected in Gimli rather than posted out. Numbers were limited.

Check icelandicfestival.com for this year's pass, its price and the list of events that need a separate ticket before you build a day around any single one.

When the crowd gets to be too much

Walk the harbour wall. The Gimli Art Club has been painting murals on the seawall since 1997 and there are somewhere north of seventy of them now, repainted as the lake weather wears them off, which means the wall is never quite the same twice. Beyond it the pier runs out to a small lighthouse, and the hill in Harbour Park gives you the whole waterfront in one look.

At the south end of Second Avenue stands the fifteen-foot Viking, designed by Gissur Eliasson and built by the sculptor George Barone, now the centrepiece of a Viking Park that was finished in 2017. Every visitor photographs it. On First Avenue, H. P. Tergesen & Sons has been trading as a general store since the first day of January 1899, and it is the most interesting half hour in town when the festival grounds are shoulder to shoulder. The Ship & Plough at 42 Centre Street is where we have ended more than one of these days. Holiday-weekend hours in a town of this size move around, so a quick phone call ahead of a long drive is not wasted.

What to wear, and when the light goes

The lake makes its own weather. An onshore wind takes the edge off a hot afternoon and then keeps blowing after the sun drops, and people who packed for a 28-degree day are the ones shivering at the beach fire by nine. Bring a layer and bring more sunscreen than you think, because there is very little shade on the park grounds or on the sand. Sunset at the start of August is around a quarter past nine, so an evening on the beach after the day's program is a genuine option rather than a rushed one.

Where to stay for the Icelandic Festival

Our three-bedroom home is in Crescentwood, south of the Assiniboine River, and it works for this weekend the way it works for most Manitoba day trips: you are in a quiet residential street at night and on the highway north reasonably quickly in the morning, after crossing the city to pick up Highway 8 or Highway 9. Gimli is a small town with a short list of places to sleep, so most visitors do what we do and drive up for the day from the city.

The long weekend is also one of the busiest in the Winnipeg calendar, with Folklorama opening around the same time, so rooms across the city go early. Our Airbnb listing shows what is open. If you are making a week of it, Folklorama fills the evenings on either side of the Gimli trip.