Greenland has been in the spotlight this year thanks to Donald Trump’s “scandalising designs” on its mineral resources.
But the vast Arctic island has also had a more welcome boost, said Henry Wismayer in the Financial Times – the opening of an international airport in its capital, Nuuk. Until now, most visitors flew in to a remote former US air base 200 miles away, and many never got to see this striking harbour town.
Home to 20,000 of Greenland’s 57,000 residents, Nuuk offers a good introduction to the island’s culture and history. Particularly noteworthy is the National Museum, where you can see the sleds, kayaks, harpoons and so on that enabled the Inuit and Paleo-Eskimo peoples to survive on its “frigid” shores for more than 4,000 years.
Nuuk was founded by the Danes, who arrived in 1721 and still manage Greenland’s foreign and defence policy. (Nearly 90% of the island’s people are Inuit, however, and most favour a gradual transition to full independence.) On a tour of the island’s southern reaches, your next stop might be Qassiarsuk, where you can see the remnants of an “older visitation”.
It was here that the Norse exile Erik the Red came ashore in AD986 and founded a village. In summer, the surrounding mountains are “bucolic with hardy grasses and wildflowers”, and little boats ferry visitors between five archaeological sites, the remains of the next four centuries of Norse settlement.
Mystery still surrounds this society’s disappearance, but possible causes include “the privations of the Little Ice Age” and a drop in the price of Greenlandic ivory (walrus tusks and narwhal horns) in Europe, due to the burgeoning Silk Road trade in Asian elephant tusks. Also “idyllic” is the town of Qaqortoq, where “bright-coloured houses spill down the rocky headland” to the sea. And from Narsarsuaq, you can take a boat trip to a calving glacier in the Qooroq ice fjord.
Blue Ice Explorer has a four-day tour from £920, excluding flights.
New international airport has given this ‘bucolic’ island a welcome boost
