Travel deep dive
South Greenland: A Farming Landscape on the Ice Edge
The mental image of Greenland is ice, and for most of the island that image is accurate. The south is the exception: sheltered fjords, deep valleys, grass that grows well enough to keep sheep, and icebergs drifting past pasture. People have farmed here for more than a thousand years, in two entirely separate chapters, and UNESCO protects the whole of it as one continuous landscape rather than as a set of archaeological sites.
Updated 2026-09-19
Why the south is green at all
South Greenland is the lushest and most fertile part of the country, and the reason is geography rather than luck. The fjords here reach far inland and shelter valleys from the open Atlantic, the growing season is long enough for grass, and the ice cap sits further back from the coast than it does further north. The result is a version of Greenland that surprises almost everyone who arrives expecting the ice: flower meadows, sheep on hillsides, hay cut in late summer, and the ice itself present only as bergs drifting down the fjords past the fields.
That combination is also what makes the region walkable in a way most of Greenland is not. Trails run between settlements and farms rather than out into wilderness and back, which means a day's hiking here ends somewhere with a roof on it. It is the part of the country where a visitor can move on foot and by small boat instead of by aircraft.
Qassiarsuk, Igaliku and what Kujataa actually protects
Kujataa Greenland, inscribed in 2017 under the full title Norse and Inuit Farming at the Edge of the Ice Cap, is made up of five component areas in the southern fjord country, among them Qassiarsuk, Igaliku and Qaqortukulooq. What earned the listing is not a monument but a meeting. Norse settlers established farms in these valleys in the tenth century and farmed them for several centuries; Greenlandic farmers took up sheep and vegetable growing in the same valleys much later, on the same hillsides, for the same reasons. UNESCO recognises the landscape as a cultural one precisely because those two farming cultures and their relationship with this specific ground are the thing being protected.
Qassiarsuk stands on Brattahlid, the estate Erik the Red established at the end of the tenth century as the centre of the Eastern Settlement, and the modern settlement is a working farming community rather than a site with a fence around it. Igaliku holds the remains of Gardar, the religious centre of Norse Greenland, in a valley of tall grass and flowers, and it became Greenland's first sheep-farming settlement in the modern era. Qaqortukulooq, the Norse Hvalsey, lies near Qaqortoq itself. Across the property the ruins sit among functioning farms, which is the whole point of the designation and also the reason visitors are asked to treat the ground as somebody's field.
Reaching the south has genuinely changed
For decades the south's air gateway was Narsarsuaq, and every older guide says so. It is no longer true: scheduled fixed-wing flights now serve a new airport at Qaqortoq, the region's main town, and Narsarsuaq has been reduced to a heliport. The practical difference is large, because Qaqortoq was previously reachable only by helicopter or boat, and the south's principal town now has its own runway. Qaqortoq's runway takes turboprops rather than the long-haul jets landing in the capital, so most routings still connect through Greenland's own network or through Iceland in the summer season.
Once you are in the region, the fjord replaces the road. Small boats link Qaqortoq with Narsaq, Igaliku and Qassiarsuk, and the same water carries the coastal ferry that works its way up and down the west coast. Confirm which southern airport your ticket actually uses, since the national airport network is mid-rebuild and printed advice ages quickly.