Igaliku is one of the most beautiful spots in southern Greenland — a tiny farming village of brightly painted houses in a sheltered valley surrounded by mountains, with views across the fjord. The setting alone justifies the trip, but this place also carries a thousand years of Norse history.
Known in Viking times as Gardar, Igaliku was the ecclesiastical capital of the Norse Greenland colony. The ruins of the cathedral, built in the 1100s, are still visible at the edge of the village — modest in scale but remarkable for their location. The site is part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing for Kujataa (inscribed 2017). The soil here is unusually good by Greenlandic standards, and the village remains a sheep-farming settlement, its green fields a startling contrast to the surrounding rock and ice. Hvalsey Church, one of Greenland’s best-preserved Norse ruins, is reachable by boat from here. The Qooroq Glacier hike takes you to a spectacular viewpoint above the fjord. Igaliku sits about 490 kilometres southeast of Nuuk.