Vacationing couple flees hotel amidst Iceland volcano eruption

A couple from Canterbury, Kent, was compelled to evacuate their hotel when a volcano erupted during their holiday in Iceland. Louise and Matthew Jones-Roberts were enjoying the final night of their four-day trip in the Reykjanes Peninsula on Wednesday night when the manager instructed guests to evacuate immediately. As a wall of fire and molten lava emerged on the horizon, the pair quickly gathered their possessions, entered a car, and drove swiftly to the airport. Speaking to Radio Kent on Friday, Louise Jones-Roberts described the event—which marks the area’s tenth eruption in three years and the sixth in 2024—as “life-affirming, surreal, brilliant, a real eye-opener.” “We were just getting ready for bed. The hotel manager came in and said ‘right, I need everyone to keep calm but we have to evacuate’,” Mrs Jones-Roberts recounted. They were instructed to follow a convoy of vehicles departing from the hotel. “We ran back, got our stuff, woke up our friend who was fast asleep, and got out,” Mrs Jones-Roberts stated. “We went out into the carpark and sirens were going. You could see the red, it was massive.” “We were behind a mountain, so you could just see the sky was lit up and the smoke.” The region where the couple was staying is located 30km (20 miles) south-west of the capital Reykjavik and is home to 30,000 people. No one was reported to have been injured or killed following the eruption, but lava engulfed the carpark and a service building at one of Iceland’s biggest attractions, the Blue Lagoon, the AFP news agency reported. There appeared to be no immediate threat to the hot pools as the lava was contained by a defensive wall. When a police officer arrived and told them to leave the area, the couple had to make a rapid decision: drive towards the sea or in the direction of the airport, from where the molten lava was flowing. “We knew that the direction of the lava was towards the airport, so we went that way,” Mrs Jones-Roberts explained. “We had been in the Blue Lagoon just before our dinner and the road that we had taken to get in was completely gone.” The couple had originally planned to walk in the volcano’s vicinity that day but had changed their plans. “We made a last-minute change of plan to go to a thermal river and we were checking the meteorological website every day,” Mrs Jones-Roberts mentioned. “They measure magma build-up and the consensus was that there was insufficient magma for there to be an eruption any time.” “It actually said no volcanic activity predicted in November.” She added that, despite “a lot of panic,” the experience had been a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see that.” “Also, you really do need to get out alive,” she concluded.