Greenland

Greenland is the largest island on earth — 2,166,000 km², roughly twenty-seven times the size of Czechia — and about four-fifths of it lies under an ice sheet up to three kilometres thick. What is left is a rim of rock, fjord and tundra around the edge, and on that rim live some fifty-seven thousand people. That is fewer inhabitants than Kladno, spread along a coastline longer than the equator.

The single most useful thing to understand before you go is this: there are no roads between towns. Not few, not bad ones — none. Every settlement is an island in practice, reached by aircraft, helicopter, coastal ferry, boat, or in winter by snowmobile and dog sledge across sea ice. A journey that looks like ninety minutes on a map can take three days and cost more than the flight from Europe. This one fact shapes every itinerary, every budget and every disappointment on the island.

Politically, Greenland is an autonomous territory inside the Kingdom of Denmark. It has its own parliament, its own government, its own flag, and since 2009 a single official language that is not Danish. It is the only territory ever to leave the European Communities — it walked out in 1985 after a referendum, mostly over fishing rights — and it is therefore outside both the EU and the Schengen area, which has practical consequences for your insurance that are covered further down this page.

And it is, at the time of writing, one of the most geopolitically discussed places on earth — a territory of fifty-seven thousand people that an American president has twice proposed buying, that sits on the shortest missile trajectory between North America and Russia, and whose retreating ice is exposing both new shipping routes and mineral deposits the rest of the world would like access to. Greenlanders have been notably clear about how they feel: their land is not for sale, and their future is theirs to decide.

The Greenlandic name is Kalaallit Nunaat — "the land of the Kalaallit", the Greenlandic Inuit. It is the only name that describes the place from the inside, and it is the one used on the island. The Danish Grønland, English Greenland and Czech Grónsko all descend from the Old Norse Grœnland.

The traditional story is that Erik the Red, banished from Iceland for killing, named the island attractively in order to attract settlers to a place that was mostly ice. The Book of Icelanders says as much, more or less openly. It is a good story and it may even be broadly true, though the south-western fjords Erik actually settled genuinely are green in summer, with grass good enough that people farmed sheep and cattle there for four hundred years and farm sheep there again today.

Names on the map are a running lesson in whose island it is. Almost every town has a Greenlandic name and an older Danish one, and the Greenlandic names are now the official ones: Nuuk (not Godthåb), Ilulissat (not Jakobshavn), Sisimiut (not Holsteinsborg), Qaqortoq (not Julianehåb), Uummannaq, Aasiaat, Maniitsoq. Older maps, older guidebooks and older Danes still use the Danish forms, and airlines sometimes list both.

Greenland stretches 2,670 km from Cape Morris Jesup in the north — one of the northernmost points of land on the planet, less than 750 km from the North Pole — to Cape Farewell in the south, which sits at roughly the latitude of Oslo. That span is the reason no single sentence about Greenland's climate or landscape is true everywhere.

Geologically it is a fragment of the ancient North American craton, some of the oldest rock exposed anywhere on earth — the Isua formation near Nuuk is around 3.8 billion years old and has been argued over by geologists looking for the first traces of life. The bedrock beneath the ice sheet has been pressed into a vast basin, so that much of the interior is actually below sea level; if the ice were removed and the land allowed to rebound, Greenland would probably prove to be an archipelago rather than one island.

The habitable part is the ice-free rim, about 410,000 km² of rock, tundra and fjord — still bigger than Germany and Poland combined, and almost entirely empty. The west coast, facing Baffin Bay and the Davis Strait, is milder, has the deep fjords and the towns. The east coast is colder, more mountainous, blocked for much of the year by drifting pack ice from the Arctic Ocean, and has two towns of any size in a stretch longer than Europe. The north is polar desert.

The fjords are the other defining feature. Scoresby Sund on the east coast is the largest fjord system in the world, branching some 350 km inland; Kangerlussuaq's fjord on the west is 170 km long and gave the old airport its access to the sea. These are not scenic detours — they are the roads. Greenlandic settlement follows the water, because the water is how you move.

The Greenland ice sheet covers about 1.71 million km² — some 79% of the island — and holds roughly 2.9 million cubic kilometres of freshwater. It is the second largest body of ice on earth after Antarctica's, up to about 3,000 m thick in the middle, and old: ice recovered from the base of the deep cores has been there for well over one hundred thousand years, through the last interglacial.

It is not a static cap. Ice forms in the interior where snow accumulates, flows outward under its own weight at a few metres a year in the middle and at spectacular speed where it funnels into outlet glaciers, and leaves either by melting at the surface or by calving icebergs into the sea. Sermeq Kujalleq above Ilulissat — Jakobshavn Isbræ in Danish — is the fastest-moving glacier of its kind in the world, and has been measured at more than 40 metres per day in summer.

The numbers behind the headlines are worth having straight. If the entire Greenland ice sheet melted, global sea level would rise by about 7.4 metres. That is not going to happen this century. What is happening is a sustained net loss — the ice sheet has been losing mass in most years since the late 1990s, with cumulative losses on the order of five thousand gigatonnes since 1992, contributing something over a centimetre of the sea-level rise already recorded.

Standing on it is a strange experience and an accessible one. The ice cap is reachable on foot from the road at Kangerlussuaq, from Point 660, and by helicopter or boat elsewhere. What surprises most visitors is that the edge is dirty — grey with dust, black with cryoconite, streaked with meltwater — and that it makes noise. Ice sheets crack, drip, run and occasionally boom, and on a still day you can hear all of it.

Arctic, but with a range wider than most people expect. Nuuk averages about 7 °C in July and −8 °C in January, which makes the capital milder in winter than parts of Bohemia and far cooler in summer. The interior of the ice sheet is another planet: the automatic station at Klinck recorded −69.6 °C in December 1991, the lowest temperature ever measured in the northern hemisphere.

Latitude decides the light. North of the Arctic Circle — Ilulissat, Uummannaq, Qaanaaq — the sun does not set for weeks around midsummer and does not rise for weeks around midwinter. Ilulissat has continuous daylight from late May to late July and no true sunrise from late November to mid-January. Nuuk, just south of the circle, gets a long twilight rather than a true midnight sun, and about four hours of dim daylight at the winter solstice.

The short answer: late June to early September for a first trip, March for dog sledging and light, September for colour and aurora. Whenever you go, build spare days into the itinerary — see the section on flights below, because weather here does not delay travel, it cancels it.

Greenland sits between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic, west of Iceland and east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, separated from Ellesmere Island by the narrow Nares Strait. Nuuk, on the south-west coast, is roughly 3,500 km from Copenhagen and about 4,200 km from Prague.

Orientation for planning: the populated west coast runs from Qaqortoq and Narsarsuaq in the far south, through Nuuk and Maniitsoq, to Sisimiut and Kangerlussuaq at the Arctic Circle, then on to Aasiaat, Ilulissat and Uummannaq in Disko Bay and beyond, and finally to Qaanaaq in the far north-west. The east coast has essentially Tasiilaq (with the airstrip at Kulusuk) and Ittoqqortoormiit, and almost nothing between them.

Greenland's animals are few in species and large in individual presence. There are no penguins — they live in the other hemisphere, and the confusion is common enough that Greenlandic tour guides have a weary standard answer. What there is instead: whales in numbers along the west coast in summer, seals everywhere, muskoxen and reindeer on the tundra, polar bears in the north and east, and birds in tens of thousands on the cliffs.

Whales are the main summer draw. Humpbacks, fin whales and minke whales feed in Disko Bay and the fjords from roughly June to September, close enough to town that you can sometimes watch them from the shore in Ilulissat or Aasiaat. Narwhal and beluga are northern and mostly winter animals; the bowhead, which can live over two hundred years, appears in Disko Bay in spring. All are also hunted under quota, which is discussed honestly in the section on hunting below.

Birdlife is seasonal and spectacular: little auks in colonies of hundreds of thousands in the Thule district, kittiwakes and guillemots on the cliffs, eider ducks, ptarmigan, snow bunting, and the white-tailed eagle, which is Greenland's largest bird of prey and reasonably common along the west coast. There are no land reptiles or amphibians, no trees to speak of, and only one native land mammal on the west coast south of Disko — the Arctic fox.

People have come to Greenland at least four separate times, and most of those arrivals ended in the population dying out or leaving. It is one of the harshest places humans have ever settled permanently, and the archaeology reads as a sequence of experiments.

The first were the Saqqaq culture, who crossed from Arctic Canada around 2500 BC and lived along the west and south coasts for nearly two thousand years, hunting seal and caribou with small, beautifully worked stone tools. In 2010 a genome sequenced from a tuft of Saqqaq hair preserved in permafrost — the man nicknamed Inuk — showed that they were not the ancestors of today's Greenlanders but a separate migration from Siberia that left no descendants here.

The Independence I and II cultures occupied the far north in the same broad period, in conditions so extreme that their camps are among the most northerly human dwellings known. Then came the Dorset people, twice, whose carvings — tiny faces in ivory and bone, often ambiguous, often disturbing — are the finest art of the pre-Inuit Arctic. The Late Dorset were still in the north when the next arrivals appeared, and then they were gone.

Around AD 1200–1300 the Thule people arrived from Alaska via Canada, and they were different: they had dog sledges, skin boats, the umiaq and the qajaq, toggling harpoons and the technology to hunt large whales from open water. They spread along the entire habitable coast within a few generations and they stayed. Today's Kalaallit are their descendants, and the continuity is unbroken — the same language family, the same hunting techniques, the same design of kayak that European sportsmen eventually copied.

In about 985 Erik the Red, exiled from Iceland, sailed west and founded a settlement in the fjords of the south. Within a few decades there were two Norse colonies: the Eastern Settlement around today's Qaqortoq, Igaliku and Qassiarsuk, and the smaller Western Settlement near modern Nuuk. At their height they may have held between two and five thousand people, with churches, a bishop's seat at Gardar, tithes paid to Rome in walrus ivory, and farms running sheep, goats and cattle.

They lasted four and a half centuries — longer than the entire history of European settlement in most of the Americas — and then they vanished. The Western Settlement was found abandoned around 1350, with livestock still in the fields. The last written record of the Eastern Settlement is a wedding at Hvalsey church in 1408, reported by Icelanders whose ship had been blown off course. After that, silence.

Why is the great argument of North Atlantic archaeology, and the honest answer is that no single explanation survives contact with the evidence. The old story — that they refused to adapt, clung to European farming and starved while the Inuit thrived — has been steadily complicated. Isotope analysis of Norse bones shows their diet shifted heavily toward marine food; they clearly did adapt. What also happened: the climate deteriorated, the ivory trade that funded them collapsed when African elephant ivory reached Europe, the sea route became harder, contact with Norway became sporadic, and a small population on marginal land ran out of reasons to stay. Some may simply have sailed away.

What remains is genuinely worth travelling for. Hvalsey Church near Qaqortoq stands roofless but nearly complete, its walls squared and solid after six hundred years. At Qassiarsuk — Erik's Brattahlíð — there are foundations, reconstructions and a working sheep farm on the same grass. Together with the Inuit and modern farming landscape around them, these sites make up Kujataa, inscribed on the UNESCO list in 2017.

In 1721 a Dano-Norwegian Lutheran pastor named Hans Egede sailed for Greenland with the intention of finding the lost Norse colonists and correcting their Catholicism. He found no Norse — they had been gone three hundred years — and instead began a mission among the Inuit, founding the settlement that became Nuuk in 1728. He is called the Apostle of Greenland, his statue stands above the old harbour in Nuuk, and opinions about him on the island are not unanimous. In 2020 the statue was daubed with paint and the word "decolonize", and the town held a public vote about whether it should stay. It stayed, narrowly.

What followed the mission was the Royal Greenland Trading Department, established in 1774, which held a complete monopoly on all trade with Greenland for nearly two centuries. Its stated purpose was protective — to shield Greenlanders from exploitation by whalers and from alcohol — and its effect was to make an entire people economically dependent on a single Danish state company that set the price of everything they sold and everything they bought. Greenland was effectively closed to outsiders until after the Second World War.

The mission's other legacy is the language. Missionaries wrote Kalaallisut down, translated the Bible into it, and taught reading in it rather than in Danish — with the result that Greenland had near-universal literacy in its own language by the nineteenth century, and that the language survived colonisation in a way that many indigenous languages did not. Whatever else the colonial church did, that outcome is real and Greenlanders acknowledge it.

The nineteenth century added an odd Greenlandic institution: the forstanderskaber, local councils of Greenlanders given real say over the distribution of trade income and relief. They were paternalistic and limited, but they meant that when self-government finally came, there was a tradition of local administration to build on.

When Germany occupied Denmark in April 1940, Greenland was cut off from its government and effectively administered by the United States under an agreement signed by the Danish ambassador in Washington on his own authority. American bases went up, the cryolite mine at Ivittuut — essential to aluminium production, and for a time the world's only commercial source — was guarded, and Greenland spent the war supplying the Allies and being supplied by them. It never went back to being closed.

The Cold War made the island strategically central: the shortest air route between North America and the Soviet Union runs over it. Thule Air Base, built in secret from 1951 in the far north-west and renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2023, became one of the most important early-warning and space-surveillance sites in the American system. Its construction meant the forced relocation, in 1953, of the Inughuit community at Uummannaq — given days to move and resettled at Qaanaaq, 150 km north. A Danish court eventually acknowledged the wrong and awarded compensation; the community's own view is that it has never been made right.

In January 1968 a B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed on the sea ice near Thule. The conventional explosives detonated, plutonium was scattered, and the clean-up — carried out largely by Danish and Greenlandic workers — became a long-running scandal in Denmark, both because nuclear weapons had been in Greenlandic airspace at all under a supposedly nuclear-free policy, and because of the later health of the men who did the work.

Then came the modernisation policies. From 1953 Greenland was reclassified from colony to Danish county, and the state set about concentrating a scattered hunting population into a few towns with apartment blocks and fish factories — the G-50 and G-60 programmes. Settlements were closed, families moved, Danish became the language of advancement, and the social consequences — unemployment, alcohol, some of the highest suicide rates in the world — are still being lived with. Two specific injuries have been formally recognised: the 22 children taken to Denmark in 1951 for a social experiment, for whom Denmark apologised in 2020 and paid compensation in 2022; and the coil case, in which thousands of Greenlandic women and girls had contraceptive IUDs fitted from the mid-1960s, in many cases without consent or knowledge, the subject of a joint Danish–Greenlandic investigation and of compensation claims still working through the courts.

Greenland got Home Rule in 1979 after a referendum, taking over schools, health, social services and internal affairs. In 1982 it voted to leave the European Communities, which it did in 1985 — the only territory ever to do so — chiefly because Brussels had authority over its fishing grounds and Greenlanders wanted it back. It now has the status of an Overseas Country and Territory associated with the EU, which is why the euro means nothing here and why EU rules, including the European Health Insurance Card, do not apply.

The Self-Government Act of 21 June 2009 went considerably further. It recognised Greenlanders as a people under international law with the right to self-determination, made Kalaallisut the sole official language, gave Greenland ownership of its subsoil resources, and set out a mechanism by which it can assume responsibility for almost every remaining field — and, if it chooses, become independent, subject to a referendum and a negotiated agreement with Denmark.

The economy behind all this is narrow: fish, above all cold-water prawn and Greenland halibut, make up something like nine-tenths of exports. Tourism is the declared second pillar and is growing fast, mining has produced far more prospectuses than mines, and the public sector employs a very large share of the workforce. Diversification is the central domestic political question, and has been for forty years.

In 2019 the President of the United States proposed buying Greenland, and the idea was widely treated as a joke. In 2025 he raised it again, rather less jokingly, and it stopped being funny. The Danish Prime Minister said Greenland was not for sale; Greenland's own leaders said the same, more pointedly — that Greenland belongs to Greenlanders, that it is not Danish property to sell in the first place, and that it does not wish to be American either.

The American interest is not new. The United States offered to buy the island in 1946 for 100 million dollars in gold, and had considered it as early as 1867. What is new is the combination of reasons. Pituffik Space Base sits on the shortest trajectory between the two nuclear powers and is central to ballistic-missile early warning. Retreating sea ice is opening northern shipping routes. And the geology holds rare earth elements, uranium, graphite and other minerals in a location that is neither Chinese nor Russian.

Greenlandic politics has its own view of all this, and it is more sophisticated than the international coverage suggests. Independence is broadly popular in principle across most parties; the argument is about sequence and cost — how to replace a block grant worth half the public budget without simply exchanging Danish dependence for someone else's. Mining is genuinely contested: the Kvanefjeld/Kuannersuit project in the south, which would extract rare earths alongside uranium, was effectively stopped by a 2021 election fought on that question and the uranium ban that followed.

For a visitor, the practical relevance is small but real. You will meet strong opinions if you raise the subject, and Greenlanders are used to outsiders discussing their future without them. The courteous approach is the obvious one: ask, listen, and do not assume that either Copenhagen or Washington speaks for the person you are talking to.

About 57,000 people live in Greenland, and roughly 89% of them are Greenlandic Inuit — the rest are mostly Danes, with a small number of other nationalities, many working in health, education, construction and increasingly tourism. Nuuk holds around 20,000, more than a third of the country and growing; Sisimiut about 5,500; Ilulissat about 4,700; Qaqortoq, Aasiaat and Maniitsoq a few thousand each. Below that come dozens of bygder, settlements of a few dozen to a few hundred people, some of which lose their school or their shop and then their population.

Greenland is young by European standards and mobile: people move to Nuuk, and a considerable number study in Denmark, where several thousand Greenlanders live at any time. The reverse flow — Danish professionals on two-year contracts — has shaped the towns for decades and is quietly resented and quietly relied upon in roughly equal measure.

The social statistics are hard and Greenlanders do not hide them. Suicide rates have been among the highest recorded anywhere, concentrated among young men and in the small settlements; alcohol and domestic violence have been serious public-health problems for two generations; housing is short in Nuuk and poor in places. Alongside this sits a society with universal health care, free schooling, near-total literacy in two languages, a national art scene, and an unusual degree of practical competence: a great many people here can navigate, shoot, butcher, sew skin and fix an outboard.

What a visitor notices first is a reserve that is not unfriendliness. Greenlandic social manners are quieter than Danish ones, let alone Czech ones — less small talk, longer pauses, less direct eye contact between strangers, and an assumption that people will say what they need to say without being prompted. Loud enthusiasm lands badly. Patience lands well.

Kalaallisut — West Greenlandic — has been the sole official language since 2009, and it is spoken as a first language by the great majority of the population. It belongs to the Inuit branch of the Eskaleut family, and it is polysynthetic: instead of stringing short words together, it builds enormously long ones by adding suffix after suffix to a root, each adding a piece of meaning that other languages would express with a separate word.

The standard illustration, and it is not an exaggeration: Nalunaarasuartaatilioqateeraliorfinnialikkersaatiginialikkersaatilillaranatagoorunarsuarooq is a real, if deliberately extreme, single word. Ordinary speech produces words of forty letters without anyone noticing. Danish loanwords are adapted rather than borrowed whole, and the orthography — reformed in 1973 to fit the language rather than Danish spelling habits — is consistent enough that you can pronounce a place name correctly on sight once you know the rules.

One correction worth making, since it appears in every second travel article: the claim that Inuit languages have dozens or hundreds of words for snow is a misunderstanding of exactly the polysynthesis described above. Because Kalaallisut builds words by suffixing, it can generate an unlimited number of highly specific snow-words — but so can German by compounding. What is true is that the vocabulary distinguishes sea ice, new ice, drift ice and rotten ice with a precision that reflects a genuine need not to fall through it.

Greenland is a hunting society that also runs a modern fishing industry, and visitors from countries where meat arrives in packaging sometimes find this difficult. It is worth arriving with the argument already thought through, because you will meet it on the first day: at the open-air market — the kalaaliaraq or brættet — in Nuuk, Ilulissat or Sisimiut, where seal, whale, reindeer, muskox, eider and halibut are sold on plain tables by the people who caught them.

The facts are these. Subsistence and small-scale commercial hunting of seal, whale, narwhal, walrus and polar bear is legal in Greenland under quotas, and the whaling operates under an International Whaling Commission aboriginal subsistence framework, not the commercial regime. The animals hunted are not, as populations, endangered by Greenlandic hunting at current quota levels — the pressures on Arctic marine mammals come overwhelmingly from ice loss and shipping. And a seal skin here is not a luxury item; it is a coat, boots and a household's income in a place where imported food costs what it costs.

The European Union's 1983 ban on seal-product imports, and the tightened 2009 regulation, contained an exemption for Inuit hunters — but the market collapsed anyway, because buyers did not distinguish. The Greenlandic sealing economy has never recovered, and this is remembered here as a case of European campaigning that hurt exactly the people it was not aimed at. If you buy sealskin in Greenland, look for the Great Greenland tannery in Qaqortoq, which is the certified national operation — and check your own country's import rules before you fly home, because the EU exemption is narrow and paperwork matters.

Commercial fishing is the other half. Cold-water prawn and Greenland halibut dominate; cod has returned to some grounds as the water warms, and mackerel arrived off the south coast around 2011 in quantities nobody had planned for. Royal Greenland, state-owned, is the largest employer outside the public sector. If you want to understand the country's economics in one afternoon, stand on the quay at Sisimiut when the trawlers come in.

The tupilak is the object every visitor comes home with, and its history is stranger than the souvenir suggests. In East Greenlandic belief a tupilak was not a carving at all: it was a thing made in secret from bones, skin and other materials, animated by ritual and sent to kill an enemy — and liable to turn on its maker. The carved figures sold today began when Europeans asked to see one and were shown a model, because the real thing could not be shown. So the entire genre is, from the start, an artefact of the encounter. That does not make the best of them any less astonishing; the finest are carved from sperm-whale tooth or muskox horn by named artists and priced accordingly.

Drum dance — qilaat — is the oldest Greenlandic musical form: a shallow hoop drum struck on the rim, a chanted song, and a performance that historically served as entertainment, as history-keeping and as a formal way of settling disputes through song duels, in which two opponents mocked each other until the audience decided. Missionaries suppressed it in the west; it survived in East Greenland and among the Inughuit, and has been consciously revived nationally since the 1970s.

Greenland is overwhelmingly Lutheran on paper — the Church of Denmark's Greenlandic diocese covers the island, most people are baptised and confirmed, and confirmation in particular is a major social occasion with the national costume and a kaffemik afterwards. Church attendance is another matter, as it is in Denmark.

Underneath sits the older system, which was never entirely displaced. Pre-Christian Greenlandic belief had no single creator but a world full of agencies that had to be respected: Sassuma Arnaa, the Mother of the Sea, who keeps the sea animals and withholds them when taboos are broken; the inua, the indwelling person of an animal, place or object; and the angakkoq, the shaman, who travelled to the sea floor or the moon to negotiate on the community's behalf. The rules that governed hunting were religious rules, and the courtesy still shown to a killed animal descends from them.

The missionaries — Egede from 1721, and the Moravian Brethren from Herrnhut from 1733, who were in some ways the more effective — broke the shamanic institution within a few generations. What they did not break was the sense that the land is inhabited. Stories of the qivittoq, the person who leaves the settlement after a humiliation and becomes something else out on the land, are told seriously enough that they are not simply folklore, and they surface in modern Greenlandic film and fiction constantly.

For a visitor this mostly matters as a matter of manners. Cairns, graves and old house rings are not scenery to climb on; take nothing from an archaeological site, including bone and stone; and if a guide asks you not to photograph something, that is the end of the conversation.

Greenlandic food divides cleanly into two categories that barely overlap. There is kalaalimernit — Greenlandic food, meaning what is hunted and caught here: seal, whale, reindeer, muskox, ptarmigan, eider, cod, halibut, Arctic char, capelin, mussels, crowberries and angelica. And there is what arrives by ship from Denmark in a container, which is everything else, and which costs what shipping to the Arctic costs.

The traditional cuisine is not elaborate. Boiling and drying are the two main techniques, because fuel was scarce and preservation was everything; frying arrived with Europeans. Meat is often eaten as mattak — whale skin with a layer of blubber, cut into cubes and chewed raw, faintly nutty, and historically a critical source of vitamin C in a diet with no vegetables. Dried fish and dried seal hang on racks outside houses in every settlement. Fermentation appears at the extreme end: kiviaq, from the Thule district, is several hundred little auks packed whole into a sealskin, sealed with fat and left under stones for months.

Modern Greenlandic cooking — the "New Nordic" strand — takes those ingredients and treats them with technique. Restaurants in Nuuk serve muskox with crowberry, snow crab, scallops from Disko Bay, and Greenland lamb from the south, which is genuinely exceptional: the sheep graze on herbs and grass under the midnight sun and the meat tastes of it. The best meal you eat in Greenland may well be in a small restaurant in Nuuk, and it will not be cheap.

Suaasat is the closest thing Greenland has to a national dish, and it is a broth rather than a stew: meat simmered in water with onion, potato and a thickener, seasoned with salt, pepper and a bay leaf. Traditionally the meat is seal; in practice it is made with whatever the household has — seal, minke whale, reindeer, muskox or lamb — and the lamb version is the one visitors are most likely to be served and the one that works with European shopping.

What suaasat is not: a vegetable soup. There are no peppers in it, no fresh herbs on top, no tomatoes and no garnish. If a picture of "suaasat" shows a bright bowl of diced vegetables, it is a picture of something else. The real thing is brown, plain and very good, and it tastes of the animal it was made from.

Arctic char — eqaluk — is the fish of Greenland: a salmonid that runs between the sea and inland lakes, caught in the fjords and rivers all along the coast, and available fresh in summer at any market. The flesh is between salmon and trout, softer than either, and it does not need much doing to it.

A kaffemik is the central Greenlandic social institution and the thing most likely to surprise a visitor who gets invited to one. It is an open house: a family marks a birthday, a confirmation, a graduation, a name day, a new home or a homecoming by putting out coffee and a table of cakes, and letting the town come through the door in waves for as long as the day lasts.

There is no invitation list in the European sense and no fixed hour. People arrive, greet the family, take a plate, eat, talk for perhaps twenty minutes, thank the host and leave to make room for the next arrivals — a town of five thousand may put several hundred people through a small flat in an afternoon. The table is usually layered: open sandwiches and small savoury things first, then the cakes, then whipped-cream layer cakes at the end, and often mattak or dried fish somewhere along it.

Alcohol has a heavier social weight in Greenland than in most of Europe, and the rules reflect a long and painful history. Sales are regulated — shops sell alcohol only during restricted hours, generally not late in the evening and not at all on some days, and individual municipalities and settlements have their own tighter restrictions, up to complete local bans. Do not turn up in a small settlement carrying drink as a gift; in some places that is illegal and in most it is a serious misjudgement.

What there is, is good. Godthaab Bryghus in Nuuk brews with meltwater from the ice sheet, and several of its beers are made with Greenlandic ingredients — crowberry, angelica, and in one case ice that came off a glacier. Danish beer and spirits fill the rest of the shelf, and imported wine is available and expensive everywhere.

Prices are the main practical point. Expect roughly 60–90 DKK for a beer in a bar in Nuuk — very approximately 200–300 CZK at the exchange rates prevailing when this was written — and considerably more in a hotel. Buying at the shop is much cheaper, within the permitted hours. Tipping is not expected anywhere in Greenland, including in bars.

One more piece of local etiquette: drinking in public places is restricted and drinking in front of children is regarded very badly. Greenlanders are direct about the reasons if asked. As with the hunting question, the useful posture for a visitor is to notice the local norms and follow them without commentary.

Two more worth a mention because their names attach to places you will visit: Hans Egede, whose mission founded Nuuk in 1728 and whose statue on the hill above the old harbour is a live argument rather than a monument; and Erik the Red, whose farm at Qassiarsuk in the south is now a reconstruction next to a working sheep station, and who gave the island the marketing name it has never shaken off.

Nuuk is the smallest capital city in the world by most reasonable definitions, and it does not feel like a village. Twenty thousand people, a university, a national museum, a national theatre in the Katuaq cultural centre, an art museum, office towers of six or seven storeys, sushi, a brewery, traffic jams of a kind at eight in the morning, and a mountain — Sermitsiaq, 1,210 m, flat-topped and snow-streaked — filling the view from most windows in town.

The place to start is the old colonial harbour, where the town began in 1728: a cluster of painted wooden buildings around the oldest structure in Greenland, Hans Egede's house of 1728, with the cathedral of Our Saviour, the statue of Egede on the rock above, and the Greenland National Museum a few steps away. The museum's central holding is the Qilakitsoq mummies — six women and two children from around 1475, found under an overhang in 1972, preserved by cold and dry air with their clothing intact. The face of the six-month-old boy is one of the most affecting objects in any museum in the world, and the display is handled with appropriate seriousness.

Nuuk changed materially in November 2024, when the new international runway opened and the city gained direct flights from Copenhagen for the first time. Everything about visiting Greenland is easier as a result, and everything about Nuuk — housing costs, cruise numbers, construction — is under more pressure as a result. Both things are true and Greenlanders will tell you both.

Ilulissat means "the icebergs", which is the least metaphorical place name in the Arctic. The town of about 4,700 people sits on the north side of a fjord permanently choked with them, and the reason is fifty kilometres inland: Sermeq Kujalleq, the outlet glacier that drains some 6.5% of the entire Greenland ice sheet and calves more ice than any other glacier outside Antarctica. The icebergs it produces run aground on a submarine moraine at the fjord mouth and pile up there until they are small enough to float out into Disko Bay.

Ilulissat Icefjord was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2004, both as a landscape and as one of the most-studied glaciers on earth: the retreat of Sermeq Kujalleq has been documented continuously since 1850 and it is a primary data set in climate science. The Icefjord Centre, opened in 2021, is a fine piece of architecture by Dorte Mandrup, and its exhibition explains the glaciology properly rather than emotively.

One practical note: the Sermeq Kujalleq iceberg field is also why Ilulissat is where cruise ships come. In July and August a single ship can add two thousand people to a town of under five thousand for six hours. If you can shift your dates to June or September, do.

Disko Bay is the great bight of the west coast, and beyond Ilulissat it holds some of the most rewarding places in Greenland. Disko Island itself is geologically unlike the rest of the country — basalt rather than gneiss, with flat-topped mountains, hot springs and, in the valleys behind Qeqertarsuaq, a small forest of dwarf birch that counts as woodland here. Qeqertarsuaq, the island's town of about 800 people, is reached by ferry or helicopter from Ilulissat and has an Arctic research station that has been running since 1906.

Uummannaq, further north, sits under a heart-shaped mountain of 1,175 m on an island in a fjord — the most photographed silhouette in Greenland after the icefjord. Its winter sea ice is thick enough for dog sledging and for the settlement's small children's home to have become internationally known. Aasiaat, at the south of the bay, is a working fishing town of about 3,000 with an unusually good music scene and easy access to a maze of small islands.

Far to the north-west lies Qaanaaq and the Inughuit, the northernmost permanently inhabited region of Greenland, where the traditional hunting economy persists most strongly and where the winters are darkest. This is not a casual destination — flights are infrequent and expensive, weather closes the airstrip for days, and visitors need a purpose and preferably a local host. It is also where the 1953 relocation happened, and the community has not forgotten it.

The far north-east is different again: Ittoqqortoormiit, a town of a few hundred at the mouth of Scoresby Sund, the world's largest fjord system, with the North-East Greenland National Park beyond it — 972,000 km², the largest national park on earth, larger than France and Spain together, with no permanent population at all beyond a research station and a military patrol.

Sisimiut is Greenland's second town, about 5,500 people, 40 km north of the Arctic Circle, and it is the one that feels most like a place that works. There is a shipyard, a trawler fleet, a technical college, a ski slope with a lift, an eighteenth-century blue church, and a lively conviction locally that Sisimiut rather than Nuuk is the real centre of the country.

It is also the northern end of the Arctic Circle Trail, the best-known long-distance hike in Greenland: roughly 160 km from Kangerlussuaq to Sisimiut across tundra, lakes and low hills, usually walked in 8–10 days, unmarked in places, with simple free huts along the route and no resupply. It requires genuine self-sufficiency — full food for the trip, a stove, river-crossing sense, and a satellite communicator — and in return it gives a week of walking through country with nobody else in it. July and August are the season; the mosquitoes in July are a real factor.

Kangerlussuaq is the other end and an odd place: a former American air base at the head of a 170 km fjord, with the longest runway in Greenland, roughly 500 residents, and the country's only road of any length — 35 km out to the edge of the ice sheet at Point 660. That road is why Kangerlussuaq is the easiest place on earth to stand on an ice sheet, and why the muskox herds around it are the most reliable large-mammal viewing in the country.

East Greenland is a different country. Cut off by the East Greenland Current, which drags Arctic pack ice down the coast for much of the year, it had no sustained contact with Europeans until 1884, when Gustav Holm's expedition reached the Ammassalik district by umiaq and found some four hundred people living entirely traditionally. Their descendants, the Tunumiit, speak a dialect that West Greenlanders do not simply understand, and their art — the mask dance, the tupilak — is the strand that survived Christianisation most intact.

Tasiilaq, about 2,000 people, is the only town of any size on a coastline of 2,700 km, set in a bowl of mountains above a sheltered bay with the Valley of Flowers behind it. The scenery is the most dramatic in Greenland — the peaks of the Schweizerland range and the Mont Forel massif rise to over 3,000 m within reach of the town, and this is where ski-mountaineering and expedition climbing happen.

The practical gateway is Kulusuk, an island settlement with an airstrip built by the Americans, about 100 people, and a helicopter or boat link to Tasiilaq. Kulusuk is the reason East Greenland is unexpectedly accessible: the flight from Reykjavík takes about two hours and is one of the cheapest ways to reach Greenland at all. Day trips from Iceland exist and are worth doing if that is all you have — but staying two or three nights is a different and much better experience.

East Greenland's social problems are the country's worst, and visitors should know that before arriving rather than being surprised by it: the highest unemployment, the highest suicide rate, the hardest housing. The community is also proud, welcoming and used to visitors, and the tourism income matters here more than anywhere. Go, spend money locally, hire local guides, and photograph people only after asking.

The south is the green Greenland — the part that justifies the name. Below the Arctic Circle, sheltered by the fjords, the land carries real grass, willow scrub, herb meadows and about twenty thousand sheep on some forty farms. This is where the Norse settled, where their ruins stand, and where their descendants in practice are Greenlandic sheep farmers doing the same thing on the same fields a thousand years later.

Access is via Narsarsuaq, another wartime American airfield, at the head of a fjord with a glacier at its end. From there boats fan out to Narsaq, Qaqortoq, Igaliku and the farms, several of which take guests. South Greenland is the part of the country where you can walk for a week between farms rather than camping, and the part where a first-time visitor is least likely to be beaten by the logistics.

Greenland has been considerably easier to reach since 28 November 2024, when the new 2,200-metre runway at Nuuk opened and direct services from Copenhagen began landing in the capital instead of at Kangerlussuaq. A second new runway at Ilulissat is under construction on the same programme. Routings are therefore changing faster than guidebooks can keep up with, and the single most important piece of advice on this page is to check current schedules rather than trusting anything written more than a year ago, including this.

Budget, honestly: a return from Prague to Nuuk via Copenhagen typically lands somewhere around 15,000–25,000 CZK if booked well ahead, and considerably more in July or at short notice. Internal Greenlandic flights then add up quickly — see below — and the domestic legs are frequently the larger half of the airfare.

There are no roads between towns in Greenland. This is the sentence that ruins the most itineraries, so it bears repeating in practical form: you cannot drive, hitch, take a bus or take a train from one settlement to another anywhere in the country. Your options are aircraft, helicopter, coastal ferry, chartered boat, and in winter snowmobile or dog sledge over sea ice.

Within towns you walk; Nuuk has a town bus and taxis, and everywhere else is small enough not to need them. Car hire exists in Nuuk and Kangerlussuaq and is useful only for the ice-road at the latter. If you are planning to move between three or more places, work the schedule backwards from your flight home and leave the slack at that end.

Greenland is expensive — Danish price levels as a floor, with a shipping surcharge on almost everything and an internal transport system that has no cheap option. The single largest variable in a Greenland budget is not accommodation or food; it is domestic flights and boats.

A workable rule of thumb for a self-organised trip: 1,500–2,500 DKK per person per day on the ground — roughly 5,000–8,500 CZK — excluding international flights and excluding domestic air travel, which should be budgeted separately as a line item of its own. A week in Greenland done properly is comparable in cost to two or three weeks in southern Europe, and there is no realistic way to do it much cheaper other than camping and cooking, which many people do.

Entry. Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark but is outside both the European Union and the Schengen area. Czech citizens do not need a visa for short stays, but they do need a valid passport — a national ID card is not sufficient, because you are leaving Schengen. Check the passport validity requirement before booking, and note that transiting Denmark means Schengen rules apply to the Copenhagen leg and Greenlandic entry rules to the second.

Health cover is the point most Czech travellers get wrong. Because Greenland is outside the EU, the European Health Insurance Card (Evropský průkaz zdravotního pojištění) does not apply here. You need commercial travel insurance, and it must explicitly cover the Arctic and, critically, medical evacuation — from a settlement, a hospital transfer means a helicopter or a charter aircraft, and the bill runs to hundreds of thousands of crowns. If you intend to hike, ski, kayak or take part in dog sledging, confirm those activities are covered by name.

Etiquette in short. Ask before photographing people, especially children and hunters. Do not touch working sled dogs. Do not walk on house rings, graves or cairns, and take nothing from them. Do not bring alcohol into settlements as a gift. Accept food when it is offered, or decline once, politely, and leave it there. And do not tell Greenlanders what they should think about hunting, Denmark, mining or independence — you will get a courteous answer and you will have learned nothing.

Greenland is the hardest country in this factbook to write about honestly, for two reasons. The first is scale: almost every statement true of Ilulissat is false of Tasiilaq, and almost every statement true of Nuuk is false of a settlement of ninety people two fjord systems away. The second is that Greenland has spent three hundred years being described by outsiders, and is at this moment being discussed internationally as an asset rather than a country. Adding to that pile requires some care.

So this page tries to be specific about what it knows and open about what it does not. Prices are approximate and move; flight routings are changing every season as the new runways open; the political situation is live. Where a photograph did not match what it claimed to show, it was left out, and where one was close but not exact — the berries in the char picture are the obvious case — the caption says so rather than pretending otherwise. Several images that came with this page's source material were rejected outright for showing Norwegian fishing villages, tandem dog teams and a vegetable soup labelled as suaasat.

Further reading and watching. Knud Rasmussen's Across Arctic America for the Fifth Thule Expedition in his own words. Jared Diamond's Collapse for the classic Norse argument and Kirsten Seaver's The Frozen Echo for the sustained rebuttal. Gretel Ehrlich's This Cold Heaven for the best outsider's account of living in the Thule district. Kim Leine's novel The Prophets of Eternal Fjord for the colonial mission at its most uncomfortable. And the Greenlandic films Nuummioq (2009) and Pipaluk Kreutzmann Jørgensen's Anori (2018), which are worth seeking out precisely because they are films about Greenlanders made by Greenlanders.

If you go: take the extra days, take the ferry at least once, eat what you are offered, and spend an hour at the open-air market watching what is actually sold and to whom. The ice is the reason everyone comes. The towns are the reason some people come back.