Greenland

Discover Greenland

Fun Foods

Arctic char, Greenlandic shrimp, Musk ox stew, South Greenlandic lamb

In 982, a Norse explorer named Erik the Red was banished from Iceland for killing his neighbors in a series of violent disputes. With nowhere left to go, he sailed west into uncharted water and found the world's largest island.

He named it Greenland, reportedly to make it sound appealing enough to attract settlers. It worked.

People had lived there long before Erik arrived. The Dorset, a pre-Inuit Arctic culture, were among the earlier inhabitants. The ancestors of today's Greenlandic people, known as the Thule, migrated from Alaska and Canada and had spread across Greenland by around 1200.

The Norse and the Thule coexisted uneasily for centuries, but by around 1450 the Norse colonies had vanished entirely. Nobody knows why. Theories include a cooling climate, the collapse of the ivory trade, and conflict, but the Norse left no written record of their end.

Denmark colonized Greenland in 1721, when a Norwegian-born missionary named Hans Egede arrived hoping to find descendants of those Norse settlers. He found the Inuit instead and stayed anyway.

What followed was more than two centuries of Danish control that suppressed Greenlandic language and culture. Greenland gained home rule from Denmark in 1979 and expanded self-governance in 2009. Denmark still controls defense and foreign affairs.

About 57,000 people live on the island, most of them along the southwest coast where the ice sheet doesn't reach.

Visit Ilulissat to see the Icefjord, a UNESCO World Heritage Site where one of the world's fastest-moving glaciers sheds icebergs the size of buildings into the sea. Dog sledding is still a working form of transport in the north, not just a tourist activity.

Eat the local food: Arctic char, musk ox stew, and mattak, which is raw whale skin with a layer of blubber. It has a firm, slightly chewy texture and a faintly nutty, oily taste that doesn't resemble anything else you've eaten. Order it before you look up what it is.