Getting around
Getting Around Greenland: No Roads Between Towns
Greenland is the size of a continent and has no road joining any two of its towns. Within a settlement you walk, and the distances are small enough that walking is usually the whole answer; between settlements every single movement is an aircraft, a boat or, north of the Arctic Circle and in the east during the frozen months, a dog sled. On top of that, the country is in the middle of replacing its airport network, so the gateway assumptions in older advice are no longer reliable.
Updated 2026-09-19
The gateways: Nuuk first, and a network mid-rebuild
The capital is now the country's main international gateway. Nuuk's airport was rebuilt with a 2,200-metre runway able to take full-size jets, and the long-haul aircraft that used to route through Kangerlussuaq moved there, which means direct services between Copenhagen and Nuuk and a link to Iceland. For most of Greenland's tourism history that was not the case, so a great deal of published advice still names Kangerlussuaq as the way in. Kangerlussuaq itself remains genuinely important, with its own seasonal direct service from Copenhagen and its role as the base for the ice-sheet road and the long-distance trail, but it is no longer where most visitors arrive.
In the south the gateway has moved too. Scheduled fixed-wing flights now serve a new airport at Qaqortoq, and Narsarsuaq, the south's airport for decades, has been reduced to a heliport. Qaqortoq's runway is a turboprop runway rather than a jet one, so southern itineraries generally connect through Greenland's own network or through Iceland in summer. Ilulissat is the next runway in the same programme, built to the same jet length as the capital's. The single practical instruction from all of this is to confirm which airport your own itinerary uses rather than inheriting it from a guidebook, because the country's main air gateways have been changing role in quick succession.
Domestic flying is the default, and it is weather-led
Air Greenland runs the domestic network, with turboprops on the trunk routes between towns and helicopters onward to the smaller settlements that have no runway. Most routes are not daily, capacity on each is small, and the whole system is weather-led rather than schedule-led: fog, low cloud and wind cancel flights as a matter of ordinary operation, and helicopter legs are the most exposed of all. Booking domestic legs together with the international flight, rather than as separate tickets, is worth doing for exactly this reason.
The consequence for an itinerary is direct: a cancelled leg in Greenland cannot be driven around, so the number of spare nights an itinerary holds matters more than the distances in it, which is why a Greenland trip is built around buffer days.
The coastal ferry: Sarfaq Ittuk
Greenland has exactly one passenger ferry, the Sarfaq Ittuk, operated by Arctic Umiaq Line along the west coast. It carries several hundred passengers, each with a berth, and works a weekly loop calling at around a dozen towns and settlements between the south and Disko Bay: Qaqortoq, Narsaq, Arsuk, Paamiut, Qeqertarsuatsiaat, Nuuk, Maniitsoq, Kangaamiut, Sisimiut, Aasiaat, Qeqertarsuaq and Ilulissat. It runs through most of the year on the southern section, with the full run north to Ilulissat limited to the warmer months.
As transport it is slow and it is not a shortcut, which is the point. The ship is the only way to watch the west coast pass at sea level, calling at settlements a flight would skip entirely, and it is also the one form of travel in the country that is not vulnerable to a cancelled runway. Travellers with time and no fixed schedule often use it for one leg of a trip and fly the rest.
Dog sleds are working vehicles, not attractions
Dog sledding in Greenland exists only north of the Arctic Circle and in East Greenland, and that boundary is not a marketing decision. In those districts the sled is still working transport for hunting and travel on sea ice, and to protect the working teams, dogs from elsewhere may not be brought into the region at all: importing a dog north of the Arctic Circle, north of the settlement of Kangaamiut, or into East Greenland is not permitted, with exemptions only for sled, police and service dogs. The result is a genuine geographic line across the country, on one side of which the sled is part of daily life and on the other of which it is absent.
For a visitor this has one clear planning consequence: a winter trip that includes a dog-sled day has to be on the right side of that line. Sisimiut and Kangerlussuaq are the most southerly towns on the west coast where it is possible, and the whole east coast qualifies, where Tasiilaq is the usual base and the sled is still part of how the surrounding settlements work. The season is the frozen part of the year, with February to April generally the best window, and trips range from a couple of hours to multi-day journeys across the ice with a driver from the local community.