Best time to visit Iceland

Long nights stack the odds in your favour: January's inky skies give you hours each evening to hunt the northern lights, forecast app in hand.

Crawl into a blue ice cave carved inside Europe's largest ice cap, a winter-only adventure that shuts once the glacier softens in spring.

With the dark still generous and the days kinder for sightseeing, February is our pick for the best time to see the northern lights in Iceland.

Reykjavík's Winter Lights Festival (4-7 February) drapes the capital in light art, with free late-night museum openings and an evening at the pools.

Heli-skiing season opens on the Troll Peninsula in the north, dropping you onto couloirs that run all the way down to the sea.

Last orders for the ice caves: March is the final full month before the tours wind down and the caves start to soften.

The equinox gives the planet's magnetic field a nudge, so late March nights can serve up some of the season's liveliest auroras.

Puffins return to their cliffs from mid-April, bustling about re-digging burrows before the summer crowds show up.

Snowmelt sends the south coast waterfalls thundering, and you'll often have the viewing platforms entirely to yourself.

Whale watching hits its stride as humpbacks and minkes return to feed in the deep bays of the north.

The Ring Road is usually fully open again, so this is a quiet, great-value month for a self-drive loop before summer prices bite.

Midsummer is the main event: around the 21 June solstice you can hike, golf or kayak at midnight without a head torch.

Blue whales, the largest animals on Earth, turn up most reliably in the north between mid-June and mid-July.

Lupins bloom lilac across the lava fields from mid-June, splashing colour over the black rock (and every camera roll).

The interior is finally open, so you can take a super jeep into the highlands, fording glacial rivers to reach a remote volcanic crater lake.

Humpback season is in full swing, and on a glassy evening sea in the north you'll often watch tail flukes rise and slip under.

The Westman Islands' puffins, the world's largest colony, are busy feeding chicks, so bring binoculars and a very good zoom.

Late August brings wild blueberries to the moorland and, once the nights darken properly, the first northern lights of the new season.

Catch the last of the puffins before mid-month, when they abandon their burrows and head out to sea for the winter.

Aurora season is back, and mild September nights make northern lights hunting far less punishing than it is in January.

Dwarf birch and tundra turn rust-red and mustard-yellow across the lava fields in the second half of the month.

Farmers ride into the mountains to round up the sheep that have roamed free all summer, and you might even be able to lend a hand at the pens.

Long evenings and far fewer visitors make October brilliant (and a lot quieter) for northern lights, especially from a country lodge with a hot tub.

The first snow dusts the peaks while the valleys still glow gold and russet, so you'll often get autumn and winter in a single view.

Ice cave season reopens once guides have scouted and approved the newly formed caves, usually early to mid-November.

Long nights and hardly anyone about make it a strong month for the northern lights, if the cloud-gods are kind.

New Year's Eve is Iceland's wildest night, with neighbourhood bonfires and fireworks lighting up Reykjavík's skyline for hours.

Chase the northern lights through the long December dark, then thaw out in a steaming outdoor pool with the aurora overhead.