Luxury Greenland Voyages

Greenland's southernmost town takes its name, fittingly, from the Inuktitut for "place of polar bears". Turf-roofed buildings from the old colonial trading post now form an open-air museum on the harborfront, backed by the vertical granite spires of Ketil and Ulamertorsuaq that draw climbers from across the world. Icebergs calved from nearby glaciers drift past the anchorage in slow procession, and Norse ruins from the medieval Eastern Settlement lie scattered across the surrounding fjords. A raw, dramatic first taste of South Greenland.

Ringed by icebergs calved from the Eqalorutsit glacier, Narsaq sits at the gateway to Greenland's Norse country, the ruins of Erik the Red's own farmstead lie a short sail away across the fjord. Sheep farms carved from the same slopes the Vikings grazed still supply the country's wool and lamb, and the town's small brewery, among the world's most northerly, turns out a beer brewed with local glacial water. A geologist's paradise too, the surrounding hills hold some of the rarest mineral deposits on the planet. Understated, but rich in both history and ice.

Greenland's small, colorful capital packs Inuit culture and Arctic modernity into a single fjord-side afternoon. Browse the National Museum's mummies and kayaks, then cross to the Katuaq cultural center for contemporary Greenlandic art, before a plate of musk ox or snow crab at one of the country's few fine-dining tables. A round at Nuuk Golf Club, the world's northernmost, plays out beneath jagged peaks and the midnight sun, while a whale-watching run into Nuup Kangerlua fjord is as likely to turn up humpbacks as icebergs. The Arctic's most livable secret.

A scatter of brightly painted wooden houses on a rocky headland, Paamiut is one of Greenland's smallest and least-visited towns, and precisely for that reason one of its most genuine. White-tailed eagles nest along the surrounding cliffs, among the best birdwatching on this coast, while the old colonial buildings and a working fishing harbor show a Greenland unshaped by tourism. Few ships of any size call here. That, more than anything, is the point.

The largest town in South Greenland gathers around Greenland's oldest fountain, its square ringed by a remarkable open-air gallery, more than forty sculptures carved directly into the surrounding rock faces by artists from across the Nordic world. A short boat ride away, the natural hot springs of Uunartoq Island let you soak in geothermal warmth with icebergs drifting past in the fjord beyond, while the ruined stone walls of Hvalsey Church, the best-preserved Norse building in Greenland and the site of the last written record of its medieval settlers, stand a few miles further on. History, art and a hot spring, in one small harbor.

East Greenland's largest settlement is also its wildest, a huddle of timber houses on Ammassalik Island facing a coastline of jagged peaks and pack ice that keeps this side of the country cut off from the world for much of the year. The Tunumiit people here kept a language and a culture distinct from West Greenland well into the twentieth century, still visible in the small museum's carved masks and drum-dance traditions. Icebergs run aground in the bay by the hundred, calved from one of the fastest-moving glaciers on earth. Remote even by Greenlandic standards.

A narrow, glacier-carved channel cuts through the southern tip of Greenland, granite walls rising sheer on both sides in a passage so tight in places that the ship's wake reaches both shores at once. Icebergs calved from glaciers further up the fjord drift through on the current, and the surrounding peaks hold some of South Greenland's most dramatic scenery. A spectacular shortcut around Greenland's southernmost cape.

The largest fjord system on earth swallows icebergs the size of small buildings, calved from the glaciers that feed it and drifting for weeks through a maze of channels larger than some European countries. East Greenland's dramatic, near-vertical peaks rise directly from water that few ships of any size ever navigate. Polar bears and muskox roam the surrounding tundra, and the sheer scale of the place is almost impossible to process from the deck of anything smaller than a ship, until you are on one.