This week’s travel dream: Far away in the Faroe Islands

Staring out across the Faroe Islands, I could’ve been looking at a “map of time itself,” said Catherine Watson in the Los Angeles Times. “More than a thousand years” of history lay in one staggering view. Located in the North Atlantic, somewhere between Iceland and Scotland, this archipelago was settled by Norsemen and Gaels sometime before A.D. 1000. Not much has changed since then on the islands (except for the capricious weather, which does so constantly). Though now part of Denmark, the Faroes have functioned as an autonomous province since 1948. They “feel like their own country,” a world lost in time.

The 17 inhabited islands are like “neighborhoods of a single dispersed city,” connected by a network of bridges, ferryboats, and undersea tunnels. The towns, both big and small, still resemble the settlements the Vikings constructed, with houses clustered tightly at the foot of grassy mountains like “trim on hems of long green skirts.” On Streymoy, the largest island of the Faroes, lies Kvivik, one of the oldest settlements. The former Viking village is “perched exactly where its ancient founders wanted it, deep in a narrow fjord where the sea was calm.” As I looked out over the pocket-size town, “green slopes fell steeply away to the sea,” drawing my gaze to the “soft shapes of other islands drifting in the pale blue distance.”

Yet “there is no softness here, no luxury except the intense color of the grass that covers the islands’ harsh bones like an apple-green pelt.” When it rains—as it does nearly every day—the grassy hillsides look almost “enameled.” Many of the landscapes in the Faroes seem almost like abstract paintings. “Wind and weather keep details at bay, reducing geography to its essence. Land. Sea. Sky. Nothing more.” This is a place where the natives measure the annual sunshine not in days but in hours. Torshavn, the largest town in all the Faroes, sees 840 hours of sun a year. It was this “clear light and those sweeping views” that first drew me to the Faroes, but the rich history will bring me back.

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Contact: Faroeislands.com