The Sheep Blocked the Road and I Didn’t Even Care
I was somewhere between Saksun and Torshavn, forty minutes into a drive that should have taken twenty, when a small flock of Faroese sheep simply stopped in the middle of the road and refused to negotiate. I turned off the engine. Fog was rolling down the green hillside so slowly it looked like it had nowhere urgent to be, which, honestly, felt about right.
That moment — engine off, sheep indifferent, fog descending — told me everything about what the Faroe Islands actually are. Not a postcard. A place that operates on its own schedule entirely.
I’d flown in from Copenhagen on a Tuesday morning, no particular plan beyond a guesthouse booking and a list of hikes torn from a forum post someone wrote in 2019. It worked out better than it had any right to.
Getting There and Getting Lost on Purpose
Atlantic Airways flies direct from Copenhagen to Vagar Airport, and the flight takes roughly two hours and fifteen minutes — cheaper if you book six weeks out, though I paid around 180 euros round-trip by booking three weeks ahead. The airport is small, calm, and utterly painless to navigate.
Renting a car from the airport is the only real move here. I paid about 60 euros a day for a compact, which felt steep until I realized the underwater tunnels connecting the islands cost a toll — roughly 100 DKK per crossing — and having your own wheels means you can stop every ten minutes when the scenery demands it, which it will.
The system of subsea tunnels genuinely shocked me. I drove under the ocean floor to reach Eysturoy and came out the other side feeling like I’d cheated geography. One tunnel even has a roundabout underground — the world’s only submerged roundabout, lit in neon blue and red, sits beneath the North Atlantic Ocean at the Eysturoy tunnel junction — and I nearly missed my exit because I was too busy staring at the lights.
My one real navigation disaster: I typed “Gasadalur” into Google Maps and it routed me down a gravel track that dead-ended at someone’s barn. Add twenty-five minutes of reversing. Use the offline Maps.me download instead.
Where I Slept and What the Neighborhood Felt Like at Midnight
I stayed at a guesthouse called Gjaargardur in the village of Gjogv, paying around 85 euros per night including breakfast — basic room, shared bathroom down the hall, radiator that clicked all night. Worth every krone.
Gjogv sits at the northeastern tip of Eysturoy, tucked around a natural harbor so small it looks like it was carved for toy boats. At midnight in June, the sky never fully went dark — just this amber-gray half-light that made everything feel slightly dreamlike and slightly unsettling in equal measure.
If you need more amenities or a urban base, Torshavn has options from around 110 euros a night for a clean, simple hotel room in the center. The neighborhood around the old harbor, Tinganes, is quiet by 10pm but never feels unsafe — just extremely, almost aggressively peaceful.
What I Actually Ate (and What It Cost)
The Faroe Islands are not a budget food destination — let’s be direct about that. A sit-down dinner at a mid-range restaurant in Torshavn will run you 250–350 DKK for a main, which is roughly 35–50 euros, and that’s before drinks.
My honest move was buying smoked lamb — skerpikjøt — from a small grocery in Torshavn called SMS Supermarket near the harbor, wrapping it in bread, and eating it on a cliff. Cost me about 60 DKK total and it was the best meal I had in four days. The flavor is intense, almost funky, like the land itself had been pressed into the meat.
For a real sit-down meal, I went to Aarstova on Áarvegur street in Torshavn — a small restaurant in a 200-year-old timber house where I had pan-fried cod with fermented butter for 320 DKK. Soup and coffee pushed the bill to 480 DKK, and I did not regret a single øre of it. They also do lamb that would make a grown person emotional.
What To Do When You’re Actually There
Drive to Gasadalur village first morning, full stop. The waterfall that drops directly off the cliff edge into the Atlantic below — Mulafossur — is real and it does exactly what the photos suggest, except louder and with wind hitting you from three directions simultaneously. Park in the small lot at the top, walk five minutes down the path, and just stand there for a while.
Lake Sorvagsvatn is the optical illusion everyone mentions — from the right angle on the ridge above, the lake genuinely appears to be hovering above the ocean, separated by nothing. The hike to the viewpoint takes about 90 minutes from the trailhead near Mikladur village and is moderate difficulty with some rocky scrambling near the top.
Spend half a day in Torshavn just walking. Tinganes, the ancient harbor peninsula with the red turf-roofed buildings, takes maybe 45 minutes to properly wander — but wander slowly. The detail is in the doors, the old fishing equipment rusting on the walls, the cats that live there and own the place entirely.
The thing that surprised me most: the village of Kirkjubour in the southwest of Streymoy, where a 900-year-old unfinished cathedral just sits open to the sky in a field next to working farmland. No fence, no ticket booth, no explanation. You walk up to a medieval ruin and touch the stone and there’s nobody around for half a mile.
Practical Things Nobody Told Me Before I Went
Budget roughly 150–200 euros per day if you’re being careful — that covers car rental, fuel, groceries, one restaurant meal, and accommodation at the guesthouse level. Torshavn hotels push that ceiling closer to 220.
June through August gives you the longest daylight and most stable (emphasis on most) hiking conditions, but even then, pack a waterproof shell, a mid-layer fleece, and a hat you actually care about keeping because the wind will test it. Do not pack sandals as your primary footwear. I saw someone attempt this. It went poorly.
Download weather apps specific to the Faroes — the Faroe Islands Weather app pulls from the local meteorological service and is considerably more accurate than generic apps for predicting those sudden fog-and-rain swings. Check it every morning. Check it again after lunch.
Danish krone is the official currency; Faroese króna notes are technically legal tender but outside the islands they’re worthless, so spend any you receive rather than saving them as souvenirs. Card payment works almost everywhere, even at tiny farm stands.
What the Faroes Actually Are, Honestly
I’ve been to places that are beautiful the way a painting is beautiful — you admire it, you photograph it, you move on. The Faroe Islands are not that. They’re the kind of place that keeps interrupting your thoughts for weeks afterward with specific images: the exact green of a hillside after rain, the sound of a waterfall you couldn’t yet see, a turf roof with wildflowers growing from it like the house had simply decided to become part of the landscape.
It isn’t a comfortable trip, exactly. The weather is genuinely indifferent to your plans, the roads demand attention, and there’s no safety net of easy tourist infrastructure catching you when you make a wrong turn. That’s the point, I think.
If you’ve been craving somewhere that feels like it hasn’t been smoothed down for easy consumption — somewhere that still requires something from you — this is it. Will you visit soon? I genuinely want to know what stops you.
Have you been here? Tell me below! Especially if you found a village or hike that I missed — I’m already planning the return trip and I have a running list of everything I didn’t get to. Which tip helped you most?
—Marina Caldwell
