in praise of the Faroe Islands

I just got back from the Faroe Islands, and I was so impressed that I feel compelled to write about it—not just as a travel destination, but as a truly special place that deserves more attention.

To contextualize this: I have traveled to over 80 countries and spend a lot of my spare time reading and thinking about how different countries, cultures, and societies function, and have never felt the urge to signal boast a place like this before. The Faroe Islands possess a specialness that blew me away.

I will provide pictures below, but to put it simply, the Faroe Islands are beautiful.

Due to its small size and limited variation, I wouldn’t say it’s the singular most beautiful nation on earth (I’d give that to New Zealand), but it’s certainly at the very top tier of the most beautiful places on earth. What stands out about the Faroe Islands’ beauty is that every single place you set foot will be beautiful. There is no real need to go to any specific destinations (there aren’t even national parks or “nature zones” in the Faroe Islands), as there is incredible beauty at every point. And no matter where you go, you will always be in nature, surrounded by a quiet that feels completely removed from the modern world.

What truly makes the Faroe Islands so special, though, is its culture and sense of nationhood.

This isn’t intended to be a deep dive into Faroese history and politics, but in short: the small chain of islands known today as the Faroe Islands, located between Iceland and just north of Scotland, were settled about 1,000 years ago primarily by people from western Norway and enslaved Gaelic women. The Faroes never attracted much immigration, as Iceland was seen as the more attractive destination a millennium ago and became the hub for those seeking that kind of escape. Today, the Faroe Islands are a self-governing nation of 55,000 people within the Kingdom of Denmark but are not culturally or politically very connected to it. They are also very rich, making most of their money from exporting farmed salmon.

Many people regard Nordic countries like Denmark and Norway as the nicest places on earth, but when you visit them, they more or less feel like well-functioning (just more so), modern countries that aren’t that different from everywhere else.

The Faroe Islands have the best of what the Nordics provide, while making you feel like you are in an entirely different world.

I want to note I don’t think this is simply the result of being a small Nordic place. If that were the case, the Danish island of Bornholm, which has a similar population of 40,000, should be just as “interesting” or special. But Bornholm is not the Faroe Islands—the people of Bornholm live in Denmark; they can and do leave. This means the more cosmopolitan, ambitious, and highly skilled are leaving, leading to a familiar cycle of brain drain and cultural loss that defines the urban-rural divide. Moreover, their culture has not been historically isolated, and due to its proximity to the rest of Denmark, it isn’t able to be all that insular.

The Faroe Islands, in contrast, have been more or less culturally and socially isolated since its founding, leading to a deep sense of insularity. There is no real urban-rural divide because there is nowhere else to go. Even with the internet, when no place is truly a cultural island anymore, the Faroe Islands are inward-looking enough that it feels like you are in the Faroe Islands at all times, and you would never confuse yourself as being anywhere else.

This inward focus has created a large amount of cultural density. In many places, “culture” feels like an aesthetic layer—a set of foods, clothing styles, or historical anecdotes. But in the Faroes, it feels deeper, like a shared operating system. When you speak to any person there, it’s immediately clear they are all operating from the same framework—a worldview that is both deeply felt and meaningfully distinct from the rest of the world.

Conservative intellectuals on Twitter and Substack are constantly sketching out their ideal society: a high-trust community rooted in family (fertility rates are high), self-sufficiency, and continuity with the past. They dream of a life lived closer to the land, with a strong sense of personal responsibility. By almost any of their metrics, the Faroe Islands is the most successful conservative nation on earth. And yet, it is also a profoundly liberal place. It’s cosmopolitan and highly educated. There is a massive social safety net and great equality, a deep belief in the collective over the individual, and a culture where economic aspiration doesn’t dominate life. It is, in many ways, the idyllic left-wing society. The Faroe Islands seems to have achieved the goals of both political tribes simultaneously, without any of the ideological warfare.

What makes the Faroe Islands special in my opinion is not that it’s so nice, but that it’s so nice yet has no desire to optimize or make more efficient (or exploit) anything to become even “nicer.” This is unusual, as most successful places reached their status by climbing a cutthroat ladder, trading off nearly everything in pursuit of greater efficiency.

To give the simplest example: the Faroe Islands are a series of islands, some of which have fewer than 10 people living on them, and are otherwise quite isolated from each other. No worry—the Faroe Islands, with a “we are all one” ethos, have power and internet going to every corner of their nation, with subsidized helicopter rides and ferries to even the smallest islands to make sure life can feel connected for all Faroese people. More well known, the Faroe Islands have built impressive and incredibly expensive undersea tunnels connecting all of the major and proximate islands to each other.

They spend this money not to make the islands more productive or efficient, but simply because they believe all Faroese people should be connected. The infrastructure exists for solidarity, not optimization. A consultant would call the tunnels and helicopter subsidies a spectacular misallocation of capital. But this misses the point entirely—they’re treating infrastructure as as a kind of social infrastructure, not economic.

The biggest example of this can be seen with sheep. The Faroe Islands are filled with grassy land, which aside from being stunningly beautiful, is nearly all empty. The reason for this is that nearly all of the land in the Faroe Islands is for sheep.

Now you would think, well, if all of the land in the Faroe Islands is for sheep, they must export a lot of sheep, or at a minimum, you can surely buy lamb at the grocery store. But no, you actually can’t find any Faroese lamb or mutton for sale in any grocery store there and none is exported—because it’s not meant for that. Sheep are slaughtered with the meat available for those in your family or community, where you can buy some meat to fill your freezer from your neighbour or cousin, but that’s it. The wool from the sheep is not used for anything productive. I am not exaggerating that this makes up something like 98% of all land in the Faroe Islands and it’s the least efficient thing imaginable—there is no need or economic reason to dedicate all this land for inefficient sheep herding—but that’s exactly the point. Sheep are an important part of Faroese culture and they want to use their land for sheep—not to make money, or because they need to, but simply because they want to.

This is what I mean when I say the Faroe Islands have no desire to optimize. They could commercialize sheep herding, optimize it, turn it into an industry like in New Zealand. Or heck, replace the sheep with a more productive use of the land. They don’t want to. They’re rich enough that they can just use 98% of their land for something they value culturally, with no meaningful economic return. The view is: we want to be rich enough to herd our sheep, not we want to herd our sheep to be rich.

Some further examples of the lack of desire to optimize: Flying to the Faroe Islands, my flight was cancelled and rescheduled for two days later. The Airbnb host proactively reached out to me to ask if my flight would arrive on time and, if not, if we wanted to refund the days we would miss. Due to our initial flight cancellation, I ended up staying in the Faroe Islands two extra days. I then asked my next Airbnb host if we could stay those two extra days and they said yes, the home was available and not to worry, it would be free.

Since there are no national parks or real hiking areas in the Faroe Islands, but rather, just people’s land, hiking trails typically are on private property, where you need to pay landowners for the right to access them. As you would expect, there is a fence with a payment sign, but of course, nobody is there to enforce the payment. The whole system runs on trust.

Now, you could say—hey, Daniel, hold on. The Faroe Islands are tiny. They receive significant subsidies from Denmark. Their economy is over 90% dependent on fish, which, while not oil, enables them to function like a quasi oil kingdom. If a plague destroyed their salmon stocks and Denmark abandoned them, wouldn’t they become a poor, dysfunctional country, forced to radically change their culture to survive?

To zoom out a bit, the Faroe Islands are incredibly rich, but the same is true for all other nations with Norse heritage—Iceland, Norway, and the Faroe Islands. And you can say: well, Iceland is rich because it has an abundance of natural resources (fisheries + geothermal), the Faroe Islands are rich because they have the perfect setting for salmon farming, and Norway is rich because of salmon farming and oil— but I think this theory of resource-luck misses a much larger pattern, one that becomes obvious when you look at their neighbours in Denmark and Sweden. There is something special about the people and their culture, that got magnified due to historical isolation.

I don’t think there’s any world in which the Faroe Islands weren’t rich—if not for salmon farming, they would have found some other way to climb the GDP ladder. But what I supremely believe is that the Faroe Islands would never become “too rich” at the expense of their culture. This isn’t because they lack the ability to become wealthier, but because they have no collective desire to dedicate their society to the perpetual accumulation of wealth. Rather, their goal is merely to be rich enough to enable them to live the kinds of lives they want.

That’s the central insight. The Faroe Islands aren’t special because they’re rich. They are special because, despite being rich, their focus remains entirely on flourishing collectively, not on getting richer.

The Faroese are remarkably competent—I believe they can solve any problem they face. But their goal is not to get distracted by the endless pursuit of optimization for its own sake. Instead, they remain grounded in what matters to them, deploying their competence only to the extent that it supports the lives they want to live, not just a life that is richer or more productive.

They’ve reached what I call a sufficient wealth equilibrium—they have enough money to live well, to connect their islands, to preserve their culture, and they’ve chosen to use their wealth to buy themselves out of the game of endless optimization. The ultimate luxury, for them, is not a higher GDP. It is the freedom to not engage in needless cultural and social impairing optimization and trade-offs

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note 1: What struck me most about the Faroe Islands was the surprise itself. I had researched them, and since the travel community discusses and ranks places incessantly, I was genuinely surprised by how much they managed to surprise me. I normally have a pretty good sense of what will blow me away, so it’s a pleasant surprise to be this ignorant about something so wonderful.

note 2: In the sake of transparency and showing more of my life in public, you can see more personal photos from the trip on instagram here (no account needed)

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note 3: Chris Arnade also found the same specialness in the Faroe Islands - I recommend his travelogue here

Walking Faroe Islands (part two)