Faroe Islands

Eighteen basalt islands in the middle of the North Atlantic, halfway between Norway, Scotland and Iceland: 1,399 km², 54,000 people, around 80,000 sheep and not a single native tree. The Faroes are one of the most dramatic landscapes in Europe and, for now, one of the least crowded.

What makes it extraordinary is the geometry. Every island is a stack of lava layers tilted and cut by ice into sheer cliffs, hanging valleys and knife-edge ridges, with grass growing right up to a 700 m drop and the sea in every direction. Villages of black tarred timber with turf roofs sit in the few places flat enough to build. The weather changes every twenty minutes, which is either the problem or the point depending on your temperament.

It is also remarkably easy. Flights from Copenhagen take two hours, the roads are excellent, a network of sub-sea tunnels connects the main islands — including the world's only undersea roundabout — and you can drive from the airport to almost anywhere in ninety minutes. English is universal. You need a hire car and a waterproof, and that is essentially the whole logistical problem.

The honest complications are two. It is expensive — Scandinavian prices with island freight on top. And there is the grindadráp, the pilot whale hunt, which is legal, traditional, and the single most controversial thing about the Faroes. This page addresses it directly rather than leaving you to be ambushed by it in a pub conversation.

Føroyar means "sheep islands" — from the Old Norse fær, sheep — and the sheep came first. Anglicised as "Faroe Islands", which is technically a tautology since oy already means island, but the usage is settled.

A stack of basalt lava flows from the opening of the North Atlantic around 55 million years ago, tilted, then carved by ice. The result is 18 islands, of which 17 are inhabited, none more than 5 km from the sea, with a coastline of 1,100 km for a land area smaller than Prague and its surroundings.

Everything is close, and the tunnels make it closer. The airport is on Vágar in the west; Tórshavn is on Streymoy, 45 minutes away through a sub-sea tunnel. From Tórshavn almost every road destination is under two hours.

Irish monks may have reached the islands first — the Navigatio Sancti Brendani describes an "island of sheep" and an "island of birds", and pollen evidence suggests grain growing before the Norse arrival. Then, around 825, came the Vikings, and the Faroese have been a Norse-speaking people ever since.

The Løgting assembly at Tinganes dates from that period, making it one of the oldest parliamentary sites in the world. The Færeyinga saga tells the story of the conversion and of Sigmundur Brestisson and Tróndur í Gøtu, and it remains the founding national text. The islands came under Norway around 1035 and passed with Norway to Denmark in 1380.

For centuries the Faroes were a poor dependency under a Danish trade monopoly that lasted until 1856. Its abolition let Faroese merchants buy their own boats, and the islands went from subsistence farming to a deep-sea fishing economy within a generation. That is the origin of everything modern about the country.

In 1940 Britain occupied the islands to keep them out of German hands after Denmark fell — a peaceable occupation that Faroese remember warmly, that made them fly their own flag, and that left behind fish exports to Britain, a taste for tea, and a strong sense of separateness. A 1946 independence referendum passed narrowly and was annulled; home rule followed in 1948.

A very small, very rich, very connected country. GDP per head is comparable with Denmark's, unemployment is close to zero, and the population is growing — unusual for a North Atlantic island community and a reversal of a long history of emigration.

"Thor's harbour", a capital of about 23,000 people — a third of the country — and one of the smallest and most likeable capitals in Europe. It has a Michelin-starred restaurant, a proper music scene, container cranes, and a government quarter of red turf-roofed houses on a rock in the middle of the harbour.

The western island, where you land, and where two of the country's three most photographed places are. It is small enough to do in a day and most people do it on the first or last one.

The westernmost island, with a population in single figures in winter and one of the most accessible large puffin colonies in the North Atlantic. Getting there is the whole adventure: a ferry that is cancelled whenever the swell says so, or a helicopter on the state subsidised service.

The northern end of the main island holds two of the most photographed villages in the country, at the ends of two dead-end roads about an hour from Tórshavn. Do both in a day.

The second island, joined to Streymoy by a bridge over the narrow sound — the Faroese call it "the only bridge over the Atlantic" — and holding the highest mountain and one of the most striking villages.

The Norðoyar — the six northern islands — are the wildest part of the country, with the second city, the most dramatic single hike, and a Bond connection that has quadrupled visitor numbers to one village.

The southern islands get a fraction of the visitors and are, for that reason, where several Faroese will tell you to go. Sandoy is now connected by tunnel; Suðuroy is still a two-hour ferry and feels like a different country.

The best reason to come. The Faroes are laced with old postal and church paths between villages, marked with cairns, that predate the roads — and the modern hiking network is built on them. Distances are short, the ascent is not, and the exposure is real.

"Ull er Føroya gull" — wool is Faroese gold — is an old saying that stopped being a joke when Faroese knitwear became a global fashion item. There are more sheep than people, they roam free on the outfield, and the entire visual character of the landscape is a product of their grazing.

A country of 54,000 people has built four sub-sea tunnels and around twenty land tunnels, and runs a subsidised helicopter service to islands with fewer than ten residents. The transport network is the most remarkable piece of public infrastructure per head anywhere in Europe.

The Faroes have around 300 days of rain a year and a saying that you can experience all four seasons in a single day. The photographs that brought you here were taken in perhaps 5% of the available weather, and managing that expectation is the difference between a great trip and a disappointing one.

The pilot whale drive hunt is the most controversial thing about the Faroe Islands, you will be asked about it, and it is better to understand it before you arrive than to be blindsided in a bar. This section sets out what it is and what both sides say, without pretending the argument does not exist.

Fifty-four thousand people who mostly know each other, in a country where the phone book is organised by first name and everyone is related to everyone. It is one of the safest, most literate and most socially cohesive societies in Europe, and it is not quite like Denmark.

Faroese is a West Nordic language descended from Old Norse, closest to Icelandic and to the extinct Norn of Orkney and Shetland. It has around 70,000 speakers worldwide and survived a period when Danish was the only written language, largely thanks to the oral ballad tradition.

Traditional Faroese cooking is built on one problem: how to keep food through a winter on treeless islands where you cannot smoke or reliably salt anything. The answer was ræst — wind-drying to a controlled ferment in an open shed — and it produces flavours that are genuinely challenging and completely unlike anywhere else.

In the space of about fifteen years the Faroes went from having essentially no restaurant culture to holding Michelin stars and appearing on every serious food traveller's list. The movement built itself on ræst, seabirds, seaweed, angelica and lamb — the exact ingredients that had been embarrassing a generation earlier.

Beer that has been brewed here since 1888, spirits flavoured with angelica, and until surprisingly recently a near-prohibition regime whose traces are still visible in how alcohol is sold.

For 54,000 people the Faroes produce an implausible amount of music, and the festival calendar is the spine of the summer. If your dates can flex, aim for one.

Oceanic, cool and astonishingly stable in temperature: the mean is about 3 °C in January and 11 °C in July, and it rarely goes far outside that in either direction. What varies is wind, cloud and daylight, not warmth.

Vágar Airport (FAE) is the only one, on the western island, 45 minutes from Tórshavn through a sub-sea tunnel. The national carrier Atlantic Airways and SAS between them serve a modest but growing European network.

No direct flight, but a short and simple connection: Prague to Copenhagen, then Copenhagen to Vágar. Total travel time is 6 to 9 hours depending on the layover, and the time difference is two hours behind Czech time in summer, one in winter.

One of the easiest countries in Europe to travel in, once you accept that the weather runs the schedule. Excellent roads, universal English, near-zero crime and very good mobile coverage — with a couple of specific local quirks worth knowing.

Expensive — Nordic prices plus island freight. The landscape is free and the hiking fees are small; everything else costs what it costs in Copenhagen or a bit more.

Among the safest places in the world by any crime measure — the Faroes have had a handful of murders in living memory and people leave cars running outside shops. Every real risk here is landscape and weather.

The Faroes reward a slow week far more than a fast three days, because so much depends on catching the weather. Build alternatives into every day.

The Faroes in ten frames — waterfalls into the sea, turf roofs, sea stacks, lighthouses and a great deal of weather.

Múlafossur, Gásadalur

A river that runs off the edge of the island. The most photographed place in the country and it earns it.

Tinganes, Tórshavn

The government quarter, on the rock between the two harbours, where the assembly has met since the Viking age.

Tórshavn harbour

A capital of 23,000, with container cranes at one end and seventeenth-century timber at the other.

Gásadalur

Cut off by mountains until a tunnel was bored in 2004. The postman used to walk over the ridge.

Saksun

A church and a few farms in an amphitheatre of hills, above a lagoon that was once a harbour.

The cliffs

Horizontal lava beds cut vertically by the Atlantic, with grass growing to the edge of the drop.

Kallur, Kalsoy

Forty-five minutes' walk from Trøllanes along a knife-edge headland. The best short hike here.

Puffins, Mykines

Ashore roughly May to August, nesting in burrows in the turf. Numbers have fallen sharply.

Risin og Kellingin

The Giant and the Witch, caught by sunrise while trying to drag the Faroes to Iceland.

From the tops

On the rare clear day, every island in the archipelago from one summit.

The Faroes are the easiest recommendation in this book for anyone who likes weather. Two hours from Copenhagen, no jet lag, excellent roads, everyone speaks English, and a landscape that looks like someone took the Scottish Highlands, tilted them, and dropped them into the middle of the North Atlantic. I have never seen anything like the light there when a storm clears.

The thing to accept before you go is that you are not in charge of the itinerary — the weather is. Come with a list of ten things and an expectation of doing six of them, and treat any clear hour as an emergency. The people who leave disappointed are the ones who booked three days, saved Múlafossur for the last afternoon, and got fog. The people who love it are the ones who gave it a week and let it decide the order.

Two specific pieces of advice. Stay at least two nights in a village rather than only in Tórshavn — Gjógv, Saksun, Funningur, anywhere — because that is where the country actually is. And book a heimablídni, dinner in a Faroese home. It costs about what a restaurant does, and you will remember it long after you have forgotten the tasting menu.

On the grindadráp: read about it before you arrive, because you will be asked what you think. It is entirely reasonable to disagree with it. It is not reasonable to arrive with a lecture prepared for people who have heard it many times from visitors who have not thought about their own food chain. Ask, listen, decide — and notice that a good many Faroese are having the same argument among themselves.

— Radim Kaufmann