Travel deep dive
Northeast Greenland: Inside the World's Largest Park
Almost half of Greenland is a single national park, and practically nobody lives in it. Northeast Greenland National Park is the largest protected land area anywhere on Earth, it has no towns, and you cannot simply arrive: travel inside it requires a permit from the Government of Greenland, applied for in advance. That one rule shapes every realistic way of seeing the place, which is why the permit matters more to a visitor's planning than any view in it.
Updated 2026-09-19
A park the size of a large country
The park covers 972,000 square kilometres, which puts it ahead of most of the world's countries by area and far ahead of every other protected area on the planet. It was established in 1974 and remains Greenland's only national park. Something close to four fifths of it is the Greenland Ice Sheet; the rest is coast, fjord, mountain and tundra along the island's northeastern edge, the part of Greenland furthest from anywhere else.
Its population is roughly forty people, and they are there to work: research station staff and military personnel, with no settlements inside the boundary at all. Scale of that kind is difficult to convey in numbers and easy to feel on the ground, where a day's travel changes nothing about the horizon. This is the part of Greenland where the landscape is genuinely indifferent to human presence rather than merely remote from it.
Ittoqqortoormiit, Scoresby Sund and the way in
Ittoqqortoormiit is the park's only neighbouring settlement and the standard land-side gateway, which is also why it appears on maps under its older name, Scoresbysund. It sits at the mouth of the Scoresby Sund fjord system, a branching complex of waterways that reaches deep inland between vertical rock walls and past glaciers that end directly in seawater. The nearest public airport is Nerlerit Inaat, also called Constable Point, and both the settlement and the airstrip operate at a scale that makes a cancelled flight a genuine problem rather than an inconvenience.
In practice most visitors see the park from a summer expedition ship rather than from a base on land. Vessels working this coast carry the permits, the ice knowledge and the small boats needed to put people ashore, and they are the only realistic way for someone without polar-expedition experience to spend time in the park. Independent travel is possible and it is what the permit system exists for, but it is a planning exercise measured in months.
Wildlife, and the rules that come with the permit
Muskox are found throughout the park, with Hold With Hope, Hochstetter Forland and the interior of Young Sound singled out as the areas where sightings are most likely. Walrus are easiest to encounter in summer around Dove Bay and Young Sound. Polar bears are the reason travel here is organised the way it is: the chance of encountering one is considerably higher in this part of Greenland than anywhere else on the island, particularly around Dove Bay and Kong Oscar Fjord, and that is the single clearest argument for travelling with people who know the coast.
The permit itself carries conditions worth reading before you sign anything. It must be applied for well ahead of departure through the Government of Greenland. Camping is allowed, but not close to the breeding, foraging, moulting or resting sites of birds and mammals. Nothing of botanical, zoological or geological origin may be collected without separate authorisation, which covers the rock you were going to take home as much as it covers a research sample. The conditions are the practical form of the park's protection, and an expedition operator handles them as a matter of course.