Greenland

Ever since 15th-century explorers returned from the distant north with wild and woolly tales of a remote region of brutish hairy pygmies, unicorns, mind-bending visions and citadels of ice, Ultima Thule has been the fantasy of all fantasies. Poets from Virgil and Pytheas to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow have celebrated it in verse; the Weimar Republic used it as a template for one of their mythic Nordic-Germanic societies; and big-haired '70s rock bands, with a penchant for heavy feedback and fuzzy guitar solos, have used it as a clarion call to youthful rebellion.

Even the juggernaut of global technology has not flattened the myth. Greenland, and especially its northern regions of Ultima Thule, remains a land of fantastical and semi-mythical proportions. The aurora borealis, the vast tundra, the glittering columns of ice and the monstrous glaciers that calve icebergs into the sea are one thing; the cold, the igloos, the dogsleds and the proverbially tight-lipped Inuit are another. But any land that has a mirage-inducing atmosphere capable of conjuring up an entire city out of thin air, or turning a dog turd on the horizon into a sailing ship, has got to be worth visiting.

Provinces

Aasiaat (Egedesminde)
Ilulissat (Jakobshavn)
Kangerlussuaq (Søndre Strømfjord)
Kulusuk

Nanortalik
Narsaq
Nuuk (Godthåb)

Nuussuaq
Qaanaaq (Thule)
Qaqortoq (Julianehåb)

Qeqertarsuaq (Godhavn)
Sisimiut (Holsteinsborg)
Tasiilaq (Ammassalik)
Uummannaq

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