Feature Destination · Kalaallit Nunaat / Greenland

Greenland: A Conservation Traveller’s Guide to Ice, Fjords and a Country Opening Up

Three new airports, a first tourism law and 179,873 visitors in 2025. Greenland is more reachable than it has ever been, and it is still one of the hardest places in the North Atlantic to travel well.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Sustainable Travel

The first thing to understand about Greenland is that you cannot drive across it. There is no road between any two towns. Everything moves by air, by boat, or in winter across sea ice, and that single fact shapes every itinerary, every price, and most of the arguments the country is currently having with itself about tourism. Visitors who arrive expecting to hire a car and circle the island will be disappointed. Visitors who accept that they are going to spend money on helicopters and coastal ferries, and that weather will cancel at least one of their plans, tend to leave changed.

The country is easier to reach than at any point in its history. Nuuk’s international airport opened in November 2024 with a runway long enough for transatlantic jets. Qaqortoq, in the southern fjords, opened in April 2026, giving a region previously served only by helicopter and boat its first proper airfield. Ilulissat’s expanded airport, in the most visited part of the country, is scheduled to follow in October 2026. United began flying Newark to Nuuk in June 2025, the first commercial route from the United States.

How many people actually go

Visit Greenland’s Tourism Statistics 2025 report counts 179,873 tourists in 2025, up eight per cent on 166,851 the year before. The agency is unusually candid about the softness of that number: 91.4 per cent of outbound air passengers were recorded with an unknown country of residence, so the split between residents and visitors had to be carried over from 2024, and some travellers who arrived by ship and left by plane are probably counted twice.

The regional shifts are less ambiguous, and more revealing. International air passengers through Nuuk went from 11,306 in 2024 to 93,753 in 2025. Over the same period Kangerlussuaq, the old Cold War airbase that funnelled almost everyone into the country for decades, fell from 69,447 to 8,179. Guest numbers in the Qeqqata region around it dropped by nearly half. Cruise traffic told a third story: unique passengers dipped slightly to 93,897, but the number of shore landings rose almost eighteen per cent to 213,674, because ships are calling at more ports on the same voyage. Paamiut went from 5,196 passengers to 29,873 in one season.

Greenland has also written its first tourism law. Inatsisartut, the parliament, approved it in the week before the Nuuk airport opened, and it introduces licensing, safety plans, insurance requirements and local ownership rules for tourism businesses. Operators already trading when it came into force are exempt until 1 January 2027. The Arctic Institute’s account of that period makes the political logic explicit: better connectivity has been framed by Greenlandic politicians as a step toward economic independence, not simply as a way to sell more hotel nights.

Who lives here

Around 57,000 people live in Greenland, roughly 89 per cent of them Inuit. That is not one undifferentiated group. Kalaallit are the majority, concentrated on the west coast; Tunumiit live in the east around Tasiilaq and Ittoqqortoormiit; Inughuit live in the far north near Qaanaaq and speak Inuktun, a dialect with only a few hundred speakers. Kalaallisut is the official language and is genuinely dominant in daily life, which distinguishes Greenland from most Indigenous language situations in the Arctic. Danish is widely used in administration, law and medicine.

Greenland has been self-governing since 2009, with its own parliament and government, Naalakkersuisut, inside the Kingdom of Denmark. Foreign affairs and defence remain in Copenhagen, which is why the island spent much of 2025 in headlines it did not ask for. Travellers should assume that Greenlanders are tired of being discussed as an asset and would rather talk about almost anything else.

Customs worth knowing before you arrive

The kaffemik is the social institution a visitor is most likely to encounter and most likely to misread. It is an open house, held for a birthday, a confirmation, a first seal, a new job. People arrive, eat cake and dried fish, stay twenty minutes and leave so the next arrivals have a seat. If you are invited, go, eat something, and do not settle in for the evening.

Drum dancing and drum singing were inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2021. The performer strikes a stick against the frame of the qilaat rather than the skin, and the songs run to love, longing, humour and hunting. Missionary pressure came close to ending the practice; what visitors see today is largely the product of a deliberate revival, and it is worth knowing that rather than treating a performance as an unbroken folk survival.

Then there are the dogs. The Qimmeq is a working animal rather than a pet, and regulations have long kept other breeds out of the sled districts north of the Arctic Circle and in the east, which is part of why the population stayed genetically distinct. A 2025 study in Science sequenced 92 ancient and modern Qimmeq genomes and found four regional populations that map onto the main human communities, minimal European dog ancestry after four centuries of colonial contact, and an arrival in Greenland alongside the Inuit roughly a thousand years ago, earlier than the archaeology had suggested. The same work records the decline: about 25,000 dogs in 2002, about 13,000 by 2020. Shorter sea ice seasons, snowmobiles and urban wage work are all pulling in the same direction.

What is worth crossing the Atlantic for

Three UNESCO World Heritage sites, and they are usefully different from one another. The Ilulissat Icefjord, inscribed in 2004, is the sea mouth of Sermeq Kujalleq, among the fastest and most productive glaciers on Earth and responsible for around a tenth of all Greenlandic calf ice. Kujataa, in the south, was inscribed in 2017 as a farming landscape shaped by Norse settlers and then by Inuit sheep farmers, and it is the greenest part of the country. Aasivissuit-Nipisat, inscribed in 2018, runs from the coast near Sisimiut inland to the ice and holds 4,200 years of hunting history across seven localities.

In the northeast lies the largest national park on the planet. Northeast Greenland National Park covers about 972,000 square kilometres, has no road access, and is effectively uninhabited apart from station crews and the Sirius dog sled patrol. Reaching it means an expedition ship or a charter flight, and both cost accordingly.

The wildlife, and what is going wrong

Greenland’s biodiversity is not abundant in species count. It is abundant in individuals of a small number of cold-adapted species, which is a different kind of spectacle. On land: muskox, Arctic fox, Arctic hare, and polar bear along the northern and eastern coasts. In the water: walrus, ringed and bearded seals, humpback, fin and minke whales in summer, bowhead in the north, and the Greenland shark, which may be the longest-lived vertebrate known. Seabird colonies of little auk in the northwest run to the millions.

The animal that shows the conflict most clearly is the narwhal. In East Greenland south of 72 degrees north, the waters hunted from Ittoqqortoormiit and Tasiilaq, aerial surveys estimated 2,758 animals in 2008, 702 in 2016, and 365 in 2022. The Scientific Committee of the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission has recommended for years that catches in the Southeast Greenland management areas be reduced to zero. Naalakkersuisut has kept a quota in place, arguing that hunters’ observations differ from the surveys and that a ban would damage food security and the transmission of hunting knowledge in communities with few alternatives. WWF’s Arctic programme reported the dispute in detail, including the view of Greenland Institute of Natural Resources scientist Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen that two recent surveys in one area detected no animals at all.

“to avoid the extinction of these stocks in the near future”

NAMMCO working group advice on East Greenland narwhal, as reported by the Animal Welfare Institute

The same working group asked the government to regulate large vessel traffic, cruise ships included, along the East Greenland coast. That is a direct line from a visitor’s itinerary to a population estimate, and it is worth sitting with before booking. Note also that narwhal is a small share of national meat supply while being a large share of what is available in two specific towns; national averages are not much use here.

Above all of it sits the ice sheet. According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service indicator, last updated in April 2026, Greenland lost 5,747 gigatonnes of ice between 1972 and the end of 2025, contributing 16 millimetres to global sea level rise. The rate went from 60 gigatonnes a year in the 1980s to 242 in the 2010s. The ice sheet has lost mass in every hydrological year since 1996. Icebergs in Disko Bay are the visible end of a process measured from orbit.

Who is doing the work

Most of Greenland’s conservation science runs through one building in Nuuk. The Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, or Pinngortitaleriffik, was established in 1995 and advises the government on quotas and environmental protection. It has departments for fish and shellfish, birds and mammals, and environment and mineral resources, plus the joint Greenlandic and Danish Greenland Climate Research Centre. It runs the research vessels Sanna and Tarajoq and field stations at Kobbefjord near Nuuk and Niaqornat in the northwest. Its advice is prepared independently of the ministry that receives it, which is what makes the narwhal disagreement legible rather than opaque.

Long-term ecosystem measurement happens through Greenland Ecosystem Monitoring, which pairs a High Arctic site at Zackenberg in the northeast with a Low Arctic site at Kobbefjord. The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland keeps a Nuuk office and handles ice sheet and raw materials work. Ilisimatusarfik, the University of Greenland, co-led the Qimmeq sled dog project with the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Arctic Hub, also in Nuuk, exists to connect this research to the public and to visiting scientists, and is the sensible first stop for anyone trying to work out who studies what.

The domestic environmental NGO sector, by contrast, is very small. Avataq, a Nuuk-based nature and environment association, has been the most visible domestic voice, principally in the long argument over uranium and rare earths at Kuannersuit near Narsaq. International organisations including WWF’s Arctic programme work on Greenlandic issues from outside, and the expedition cruise sector self-regulates through the Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators. For a traveller, the practical implication is that scrutiny of tourism’s footprint mostly comes from the state science institute and from Visit Greenland’s own statistics, not from a large watchdog community.

It is not for everyone, and that is fine

Greenland is expensive, and not in a way that a shoulder season booking fixes. Flights are the largest single line in most budgets. Beds are limited; Visit Greenland commissioned capacity analyses for Nuuk, Ilulissat and Qaqortoq precisely because the ceiling is close. The average stay in 2025 was 2.3 nights, and in Sermersooq West it fell from 3.0 to 2.3 even as guest numbers rose ninety per cent, which is the statistical signature of a city being visited quickly rather than explored.

Weather will interfere. Fog closes airports for days. There is very little to buy, no landscape of restaurants outside Nuuk, and menus will include seal and whale, which some visitors will find difficult and should not argue about with the person serving it. Residents themselves are broadly positive about tourism: Visit Greenland’s first citizen survey, published in 2026, found general goodwill alongside a clear demand for stronger dialogue and clearer rules. That is an invitation to behave well, not a blank cheque.

Go if you want to spend a week somewhere that will not arrange itself around you. Do not go for a list of sights. The best argument for Greenland is that it is one of the few places left where a visitor can watch a country decide, in public and in real time, how much of itself to sell.

Further reading: Visit Greenland’s Tourism Statistics 2025, and our earlier report from the same issue, Air Pollution in Greenland’s Ports: What Ten Days of Measurements Found in Ilulissat.

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SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean