Tourism is coming slowly to Greenland, but that's part of the charm of it
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 7 April 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, is currently enjoying over 14 hours of daylight, a figure that is climbing swiftly towards midsummer. But how much fun is the Arctic territory? My excellent colleague, global travel editor, Annabel Grossman, says: "Tourism might be coming slowly, but that's part of the charm of it ... It's difficult to do on the cheap, but it feels very authentic." She recommends a combo of Reykjavik in Iceland and Nuuk, the Greenlandic capital – with added exploration.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, it's Tuesday the 7th of April. |
| 0:09.1 | If you happen to be listening in Greenland, which I agree is probably unlikely, you will have noticed that since the spring equinox, you are in the very happy position of just getting so much more daylight than the rest of us, being north of the Arctic Circle. |
| 0:27.7 | Somebody who has recently been to Greenland is my excellent colleague, Global Travel Editor Annabel Grossman, and Annabel, I think we may disagree about Greenland. But tell me what your |
| 0:43.3 | travels there consisted on. So I was in Greenland about six weeks ago. So it was still quite cold and I was |
| 0:49.9 | there. It was hovering around the freezing mark. I think at the lowest it got to minus 12. |
| 0:56.1 | So cold, not ridiculously cold, very much bearable. |
| 1:00.8 | And I spent some time in the capital, which I thought was very interesting. |
| 1:05.4 | And then I took a short flight to Sissimuit, where I went husky sledding and snowmobiling and was a |
| 1:14.2 | rather different experience. That sounds actually very good fun, apart from the extreme cold, |
| 1:20.7 | because I imagine if you're racing across the snow behind a team of huskies, the windchill must be |
| 1:26.5 | quite significant. Yes, that's a very good point. |
| 1:29.2 | I'm quite good at getting the right gear before I travel to somewhere cold. I'm a big believer in |
| 1:34.5 | being able to travel anywhere so long as you properly equip yourself. The one thing I would say is when |
| 1:39.5 | you are behind a pack of huskies racing across the snow. It is freezing and that even was a little bit |
| 1:47.5 | much even for me. The other thing I would say is it's quite a difficult place to travel around. |
| 1:54.1 | It's tourism is coming and it's coming steadily. But one of the things I noticed is that I kept |
| 2:00.4 | slipping wherever I went, so I'd |
| 2:02.1 | recommend putting spikes on your boots. The roads weren't iced, the hotels I was stayed in, |
| 2:06.8 | they weren't necessarily ready for tourists, still a really good experience. |
| 2:13.5 | Well, let's talk about the rewards, just this vast blankness, which I guess quite a lot of people who've flown maybe from the UK to the west coasts of the US or Canada would have flown over and thought, goodness. |
| 2:25.9 | Do you know what? Flying over Greenland, just coming into land in Greenland, it was quite breathtaking. And I mean, I'm well travelled, youed, you're well-travelled. It was like |
| 2:35.1 | nowhere else I'd ever seen. And one of the things about Greenland is, yes, tourism might be coming |
... |
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