Just like magic: Activating landscape of witchcraft and sorcery in rural tourism, Iceland

Strandir is a remote, rural region in northwest Iceland. Steady declines in its traditional economic backbone, sheep farming and coastal fisheries means that the inhabitants are increasingly looking towards tourism as a new source of income. They have not necessarily used conventional economic methods to shape the landscape as an attraction. In 2000 a Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft opened in the only urban center in the region, a town of 400 inhabitants called HÃlmavÃ-k. The opening re-invokes an old history since the seventeenth century when it became notorious for witch hunting and burning. History tells about people fighting a dreadful situation of scarcity and hunger while trying to activate the powers of nature to change their circumstances. Many today in Strandir did not initially support the museum and worried about activating this horrific part of history in order to create and image for the region. This attitude seems to have changed dramatically since the museum appears to have performed magically, as measured by the growing numbers of tourists. My purpose is to show how the museum brings together different temporal and spatial realities that creates a place of œin-betweenness that is constantly in the making, continuously œbecoming through the magic that the museum brings about in order to activate the regional landscape as an attraction.