How to plan a trip to Greenland's top destinations

30.08.2024 - 22:31 / lonelyplanet.com

Aug 30, 2024 • 13 min read

Greenland is a real-life adventure playground where cultural exploration and wildlife watching are like nowhere else on Earth. Here there are towns with more sled dogs than people, scientists engaged in world-leading climate change research, streets where polar bears occasionally wander and welcoming local townships to visit. A visit here will reaffirm your love of the world and a sense of awe in nature; once you’ve been, there will always be a little chip of ice in your heart calling you back.

Day hikes take you to the edge of glaciers, boat tours weave amid icebergs under the midnight sun, dinners offer a taste of the edge of the world, and wildlife watching gives you new perspectives on whales, seabirds and bears. Some of the travel experiences here are intrepid – if that’s your vibe – but there’s plenty for soft adventurers too.

Travel in Greenland is highly seasonal. Summer's midnight sun gives you light all day and all night, allowing for extra hours of adventuring, fantastic photo opportunities (and the kind of light that makes every shot look exceptional), and nobody, not even nature, telling you when it’s time to go to bed. It’s not exactly warm – you could expect snow flurries and very cold winds from the north at any time in the summer months, depending on where you are – but the constant sunlight certainly helps. The summer is peak season and prices are at their pinnacle too. Note that it’s not possible to see the northern lights in summer; you’ll just have to come back when it's darker (the exact month depends on the region).

Some things to know before you start planning: Greenland is vast, and you cannot do it all in one trip. You can’t just drive across Greenland, either: communities cluster around the edges of the country with no roads connecting them (there's an ice sheet in the middle of this large island), so you have to take a boat, a helicopter ride, a ferry or an internal flight to get from place to place. Instead, our advice is to focus on a single region during your trip, so you make the most of it instead of spending all your time and money traveling. Each of the regions of Greenland has a slightly different flavor and there’s something to delight you in all of them.

Vibes: Greenland’s tourist capital, Ilulisaat, is a bustling hive of kayak tours, midnight sun iceberg cruises and inland icecap adventures during the summer months. Cruise ships arrive for day excursions, the town’s extraordinary number of sled dogs howl day and night, and the path to the beautiful Icefjord Center and its walkway down to the old settlement of Sermermiut is thronged with visitors. 

Do: Take a day trip (or longer) to Qeqertarsuaq (Disko Island), which is a couple of hours by