Selasetur Íslands

For the past few days Sealcenter staff has been on a field trip to Scotland to visit museums and centers. The trip is part of the project  Ongoing growth of nature based toursim in Húnaþingivestra funded by the North west growth fund.

After this trip as well as the trip that was taken to Denmark in december the first phase of the project is completed. The next phase has already started with processing the ideas that were gathered as well as designing a bigger Seal Center as well as its surroundings at the harbour area in Hvammstangi. The goal is to finish the project before the summer.

We are very grateful for the support of the North west growth fund.

At the Seal Center you can now adopt a grey seal pup. Seal adoptions have in the past few years been getting more and more popular as a christmas present and our customers say that they are the “perfect gift for the person that owns everything”. By adopting a sela you are also suporting seal research in Iceland for all proceeds go directly into research.

Click here for more information

 

This summer we started using an electronic guestbook at the Seal Center. Our guestes are invited to register their names and email and every month we pick a lucky winner. The winner gets a Seal Center T-shirt. 

The winners for this summer and fall are:

July – Verbena Huber

August – Eric Vandenbosch

September – Yves Jacobs

October – Bergsteinn Örn Ólafsson

We kindly ask the winners to send us their adress ass well as a T shirt size request. 

Our guestbook lottery will start again in march 2015.

 

The Icelandic Seal Center recently won a bid for a grant with the Growth fund of North West of Iceland for the project Continuing growth of nature based tourism in Húnaþing vestra. The project involves design of the expansion of the Seal Centers exhibition as well as design of the area outside the Center as well as the Hvammstangi harbour area as a whole. The goal of the project is to engourage tourists to stay longer in the area. 

The grant was for IKR 6 millions. Total cost of the project is estimated roughly IKR 13 millions. 

The Seal Center has many partners in this project: The municipality of Húnaþing vestra, Kaupfélag V-Hún general store, Toursim association of  V-Hún, Gauksmýri ehf, Reykir museum, The library of V-Hún, The school of Húnaþing vestra, The Tourism Department of the University of Hólar, Kidka Wool Factory, Sealwatching and Institute of Freshwater Fisheries.

The project will officially start at the end of november this year and finish mid year 2015. Project manager is  Unnur Valborg Hilmarsdóttir, managing director of the Seal Center.

Earlier this year the Seal Center was part of a successful bid, with the University of Stockholm, for a grant from the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and the Social Sciences to address issues concerning the ecology and social behavior of different seal species from a diachronic perspective in connection to human activity and environmental change. Sandra Granquist, Leah Burns and Erlingur Hauksson are currently in Stockholm participating in the first of two workshops on human-seal interrelationships funded by this grant. Sandra and Erlingur will give a presentation on “Ecology and ethology of current seal populations” and Leah will give a presentation on “Cultural values and perceptions of seals in Northern Europe”.

The second workshop will be held in Iceland in 2015.