The museum, which is a tribute to the town’s glory days as the herring capital of the world, is made up of three separate buildings. The first is the Boathouse in which there is a recreation of the town’s once bustling port, complete with dock and 11 boats of various types and sizes, which we were allowed to board and clamber about.

The second building we went into was the Grana, a model of the original reduction factory that operated in Siglufjordur between 1919 and 1950. This is where men and machines transformed the herring into oil and fish-meal.

The last building we entered was the Roaldsbrakki, a former Norwegian salting station built in 1907. This was where the herring that did not go to the reduction factories went to be salted to become human food, especially for the hungry European countries during the two World Wars.

On the 3rd floor of the Roaldsbrakki (salting station building) were the living quarters for the “herring girls,” the women that came from all across Iceland and other Scandinavian countries to take jobs gutting, cleaning, and salting barrels of freshly caught fish.