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Greenland is one of the wildest destinations on Earth (Picture: Odd ANDERSEN / AFP via Getty Images)
Wearing swimming trunks and a brave face, Jack Laws plunges from the deck into Arctic waters embroidered with icebergs. A few hours later, he’s 200 metres from a polar bear, bobbing in the ocean on a zodiac.
‘That was the highlight of the trip, for sure. It was stunning, but very, very isolated,’ the 29-year-old British filmmaker tells Metro.
He is one of thousands of travellers who have recently made the journey to Greenland, a ruggedly pristine wilderness steeped in rich Indigenous culture that now finds itself thrust into the geopolitical spotlight.
Donald Trump has once again pulled the world’s largest island out of its frozen anonymity, reviving talk of American occupation and anxiety among European leaders.
‘We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it,’ the US president told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, a day after attacking Venezuela and seizing its president, Nicolas Maduro.
But before it made headlines as the latest pawn in Trump’s political game, Greenland was emerging as an up-and-coming travel destination.
Filmmaker Jack Laws had unforgettable experiences in Greenland (Picture: Jack Laws)
Spanning an almost unfathomable two million square kilometres, the island is so vast it’s hard to imagine.
Only 11 countries are bigger. It covers a land mass bigger than Texas, yet it’s home to just 56,000 largely Inuit people.
An icecap several miles deep covers 80% of Greenland, forcing the Inuit to live along the coast in brightly painted communities.
Jack recalls watching a fisherman chopping whale by the shore and feeding it to his dogs by the side of the road in Nuuk.
Perhaps the off-cuts of mattak (pronounced ‘muktuk’) — a traditional Greenlandic delicacy of raw whale-skin and blubber, which is salty, oily and a bit like rubber.
There’s nowhere like it on Earth, and that goes for the food, too. Expect to find dishes made with whale meat, cod, shrimp and lumpfish roe (the Greenlandic equivalent of caviar) on the menu in restaurants.
Greenland spans an almost unfathomable two million square kilometres (Picture: Metro)
Featured in must-visit lists from esteemed names such as Conde Nast in 2025, accessibility had long held Greenland back from becoming a bigger player in the adventure travel scene.
Unorthodox and unique, it’s a place where you can sip craft beer filtered by 100,000-year-old glacial ice.
Watch humpback whales breach crystalline water. Camp on icebergs the size of Manhattan skyscrapers and marvel at the remains of Viking longhouses dating back to their 10th-century arrival.
But getting there involved expensive and time-consuming indirect flights to isolated airstrips like the one at Kangerlussuaq, a desolate town that served as a US airbase during WWII.
The world’s largest island from above (Picture: Adam Hay-Nicholls)
Adam Hay-Nicholls, a journalist who writes about travel and Formula 1, landed there in 2021 to cover Extreme E, an electric off-road racing series in extreme environments, which highlighted the impact of climate change.
‘It’s in the absolute middle of nowhere, with this really long runway where they used to land B-52 [fighter jets] during the Cold War,’ he says.
After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the US handed the base back to the 400 or so people who live in the town.
What they left behind left a lasting impression on Adam and the crew he visited with. ‘There were all these American cars from the 80s just lying around rusting, Fords and Buicks and Chevys, amazing things, you know. Even those yellow American school buses.’
American school buses at the Kangerlussuaq airstrip in 2021 (Picture: Adam Hay-Nicholls)
Cold War relics (Picture: Adam Hay-Nicholls)
These days, the island is opening up, and landings are more refined.
Late in 2024, the capital Nuuk opened a long-awaited international airport, and in June 2025, United Airlines launched a twice-weekly direct service from Newark to Nuuk, heralding a new era of travel for the remote Arctic territory.
Still, most of Greenland’s tourism takes place at sea. Driving its record 141,000 visitors in 2024 was a surge in Arctic cruise tourism.
This year, Virgin Voyages will visit Greenland on an Iceland-New York transatlantic, while HX sails in its waters from Reykjavik in June.
‘When you’re out there, surrounded by nothing but ice and rocks and the Northern Lights, you’re overwhelmed by the feeling that you are the only person for miles and miles,’ says Adam.
Winter’s most stellar attraction is Northern Lights chasing (Picture: Ollie Taylor / @capturetheatlas)
The most authentic way to explore the island is on the multi-day coastal ferry, the long-running Sarfaq Ittuk, of the Arctic Umiaq Line.
Much like Norway’s Hurtigruten, it is more relaxed than modern cruise ships and includes stops that allow passengers to meet Inuit communities.
In summer, midnight sun provides light all day and all night. From June to August, the frozen rock becomes a playground.
Melting ice sheets expose green fields blanketed with buttercups. Fjords shimmer in the sun. Rivers run thick with trout, and strawberries shade the hills ruby red.
Anna Richards, a writer who spent 12 days backpacking across Greenland in September, describes the scene. ‘The landscape is wild, in some ways it’s odd because you don’t see trees. I’m not sure that I’ve ever been anywhere that I haven’t seen trees for that amount of time.
‘It’s off the scale. The towers of ice and the changing shape of the icebergs. It’s special.’
Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, has a population of around 20,000 people (Picture: Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Elsewhere, the Greenland National Museum and Nuuk Art Museum are a window into local history and traditions.
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‘I’m in love with Nuuk,’ says Jeanine Barone, a travel writer who has been there several times.
‘It’s a buzzy, savvy city with contemporary art, design, architecture, cuisine (and fashion). And the creatives take their inspiration from the land — its colours, textures and light — as well as the ways of the Inuit.’
What Greenland’s future looks like remains to be seen. But for now, the glare of the international spotlight reveals the wonders it has to offer.
What are you waiting for?
Who controls Greenland?Greenland is one of three territories that make up the Danish kingdom, alongside the Faroe Islands and Denmark itself.
Greenland has been autonomous since 2009, when the Danish parliament recognised the Greenlandic people as a nation in their own right. The law gave the country the right to become fully independent at any time.
As it stands, Greenland has its own flag, language and institutions, but the judiciary, defence, monetary policy and foreign affairs are all controlled by Denmark.
This sovereignty was declared in 1921 with support and recognition by the United States, which had a say due to Greenland’s proximity.
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