Faroe Islands travel: beds in Tórshavn, islands by day

How visitors reach the Faroe Islands

There are two ways in. One is Vágar Airport, the only airport in the islands, which British Royal Engineers built in 1942 and 1943 during the wartime occupation that Faroe Islands: history describes. Scheduled international flights land there from Scandinavian Airlines and from Atlantic Airways, the airline the Faroese government owns. Passenger numbers at Vágar rose by 43% in the ten years before a new terminal opened in 2014, and the airport expected more than 250,000 passengers that year. In late 2019 Atlantic Airways announced that it was preparing non-stop flights to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

The approach is known for turbulence. Visit Faroe Islands, the official tourist board, tells arriving passengers that a pilot may hold off descending until the wind settles or the cloud lifts, and that in bad weather the answer is to wait. The airport sits on Vágar at 84 metres above sea level, on an island with colder and snowier winters than most of the archipelago.

The other way in is by sea. Smyril Line runs a regular passenger, car and freight service linking the islands with Hirtshals in Denmark and Seyðisfjörður in Iceland, which is how a visitor arrives with a car of their own. Britannica also records regular shipping services to Denmark and Iceland and, in summer, to Shetland.

Arriving from Europe involves no border check on the way. The Faroe Islands are outside the European Union and outside the Schengen Agreement, but they have belonged to the Nordic Passport Union since 1966, and since 2001 there have been no permanent border checks between the Nordic countries and the rest of the Schengen Area. The islands stayed out of the European Economic Community in 1973, a choice Faroe Islands: politics follows through, and a protocol to Denmark's accession treaty means that Danish nationals living in the Faroes are not citizens of the European Union. The currency follows Denmark's: the Faroese króna is issued by the Danish central bank at the same value as the Danish krone, banknotes are Faroese or Danish and coins are Danish.

Why most hotel nights are spent near Tórshavn

Statistics Faroe Islands registered just over 230,400 hotel nights in 2024, up by almost 8,900 on 2023 and close to the level of 2022. Its chart of the year splits them into 209,260 in the capital area and 21,174 outside it, so about 91% of hotel nights in 2024 were spent in and around Tórshavn. The office notes that the split has been much the same for three years. Hotels on Suðuroy are left out of these figures altogether.

The hotels are few enough to count as a single stock. In 2024 an average of 545 rooms were available, and about 95,000 check-ins were recorded, roughly 2.4 nights per check-in on average. Room availability grew by more than 6,500 room nights across the year while occupied room nights fell by about 2,650, and the annual occupancy rate dropped from 52% in 2023 to 49% in 2024. It had been 61% in 2019. Hilton opened a hotel in the islands in late 2020, the first global chain to do so.

The concentration comes from where the beds and the services are. Researchers writing in the Island Studies Journal, after fieldwork in April 2021, reported that tourists usually return to the capital after a day trip because most smaller communities lack the facilities they want for an overnight stay. A Visit Faroe Islands representative they interviewed said that Tórshavn's hotels are fully booked in high season, especially in July, and that visitors then look for rooms elsewhere. Before the Eysturoy tunnel opened, the overflow went to places such as Vestmanna; afterwards the representative expected it to move to Runavík and Klaksvík, now closer by road.

Who fills the Faroese hotel beds

Guests from outside the Faroes and Denmark now take half of those nights, and their share is growing. From January to November 2024 Statistics Faroe Islands counted 50,881 hotel nights by residents of the Faroes, down 7% on the same months of 2023, and 60,702 by residents of Denmark, down 4%. Residents of everywhere else took 111,621, up 16%. Over the full year of 2024 visitors from outside the Faroes and Denmark registered some 113,500 hotel nights, 16% more than in 2023.

The longer trend is steeper. The Island Studies Journal paper, citing Statistics Faroe Islands, put the growth in overnight stays at more than 60% over the ten years to 2022, with visitor arrivals up by 13% in 2019 alone. Visit Faroe Islands had its marketing budget doubled in 2013. The share of the economy this represents depends on who is measuring: Wikipedia gives tourism 1.4% of GDP in 2015, the same journal paper cites a figure of 6% given by the Danish embassy in Japan in 2021, and a University of Copenhagen article of October 2025 put tourism revenue above one billion Danish kroner a year. Fishing still supplies the great majority of exports, as Faroe Islands: economy sets out.

Cruise ships are counted separately. Nordregio, the Nordic Council of Ministers' research institute, reported in 2025 that cruise tourism had grown considerably and that the role of foreign companies in it was a source of local tension. Tórshavn's own tourism strategy, adopted by the city council in May 2022 for the years 2022 to 2026, contains 26 recommendations, and one of its actions is to revisit the cruise strategy so that visitor pressure on popular sites can be managed.

How tunnels and roads spread visitors between islands

Leaving Tórshavn for the day mostly means driving. The main islands are joined by bridges, causeways and tunnels, some of them under the sea, and Faroe Islands: geography tells how that network was bored through the basalt. The Eysturoy tunnel, opened in 2020, cut the drive from Tórshavn to Runavík from 1 hour 14 minutes to 16 minutes. The Sandoy tunnel followed in 2023. Traffic keeps to the right, and cars carry the vehicle code FO. There are no railways. Strandfaraskip Landsins, owned by the government, runs the public buses and ferries to the main towns and villages.

The tunnels were planned for residents and for industry, and the researchers who studied them in 2021 found that the tourist board had no transport strategy aimed at visitors. They also found the tolls working against dispersal. A resident they interviewed paid 75 kroner for each passage through the Eysturoy tunnel, while the fee they recorded for tourists was 175 kroner each way, and no sign along the route gave the cost. Because an older road around the fjord still exists, locals called it a luxury tunnel, and the researchers concluded that high tolls could keep visitors sleeping in Tórshavn and driving out and back.

Visit Faroe Islands has since pushed the other way. By October 2025, according to the University of Copenhagen, its most recent campaign promoted self-drive car rental as a way to spread visitors more evenly and relieve the most visited sites. The HEIM strategy the tourist board launched in 2023, running towards 2030, includes spreading tourism through the year and improving infrastructure and mobility.

Which islands still need a ferry or a helicopter

The road network stops at the water in several places, and those islands are where a day's plan depends on a timetable. Suðuroy, in the south, has no fixed link, and reaching it from Tórshavn means a ferry crossing of about two hours on the ship Smyril. The transport minister said in a 2020 interview that a tunnel to Suðuroy would save the government at least 90 million kroner a year on that ferry service, and the island studies researchers noted in 2021 that the project still had no settled plan.

Smaller islands have smaller boats. Mykines to the west, Kalsoy, Svínoy and Fugloy to the north, Hestur west of Streymoy and Nólsoy east of Tórshavn are all served by small ferries, and some also by helicopter. Koltur and Stóra Dímun have no ferry at all and can be reached only by helicopter. Atlantic Airways runs a helicopter service that reaches each of the islands.

Mykines draws visitors for its birds and its rock. Puffins begin returning in spring, which Visit Faroe Islands treats as the start of the birdwatching season, and on the north of the island the lava has set in regular vertical columns up to 30 metres high. Weather also decides whether a boat sails. Visit Faroe Islands warns that storm winds regularly cancel or delay ferries and buses, and on the outer islands a cancelled crossing can mean a night that was not planned.

What the new Faroese access law asks of walkers

Walking across Faroese hill land was governed by a law of 1937 that made no provision for modern tourism, and Nordregio reports that farmers and tour operators had filled the gap with their own unregulated and unauthorised arrangements. The Løgting replaced it in 2024 with a law that sets rules for hiking across the islands. Certain trails now carry an access fee. Visitors aged 16 and over staying in paid accommodation pay a sustainability fee of 20 kroner a night, capped at 200 kroner, and the revenue is meant for path maintenance, tourism planning and conditions at popular sites. The law also allows areas to be closed at particular times, such as the lambing season or in bad weather, and gives local communities the power to limit visitor numbers.

The law was contested. Nordregio records strong protests from farmers and from groups defending a right to roam of the kind other Nordic countries have, heated political and public debate, and several rounds of consultation before it passed. The University of Copenhagen notes that one aim was to give local communities more say over development.

Saksun shows what the law was written for. The settlement had 13 inhabitants when the University of Copenhagen reported on it in 2025, and it and Gásadalur are among the most photographed places in the islands. In 2023, after visitors had trampled the grass the sheep need, residents put up sharply worded signs in English regulating where people could walk, and in places discouraging them altogether, alongside other signs pointing to what the village sells. Residents have since changed approach and promote Saksun as a heritage site.

The tourist board had already tried closing ground outright. Its "Closed for Maintenance" campaign sent a first crew of volunteers to the islands in April 2019 to work with local people at ten locations, building and repairing hiking paths and putting up signs. Nordregio notes that the closures made international news and so drew more visitors, and that Faroese tourism planners describe gradual growth, managed so that the land and the villages can carry it, as the intended result.

How Faroese residents weigh the visitors

Surveys of opinion point in two directions at once. A study in the Consortium Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, reported by Wikipedia, found that over 45% of Faroese respondents believed tourism brought more benefits than problems, and 95% said they would like to see more tourists in their communities. Nordregio cites research by Plieninger and colleagues from 2018 in which more than half of Faroese respondents expressed concern about tourism development, and the interviews behind its own 2025 report found small villages describing a sense of being on display and a belief that the money goes to foreign companies or to Tórshavn.

The University of Copenhagen researcher Hanna Birkelund Nilsson, who did fieldwork in 2023, followed a Faroese guide who earned her living showing visitors round and reprimanded those who stepped off marked paths. Nilsson reads the guide's double position as the islands' own: tourism brings money to a country that hopes for more independence, and growth becomes harder to justify if it damages the ground and the villages that visitors come for.

When the Faroese weather suits a visit

The tourist board describes the climate as subpolar oceanic, mild for its latitude because of the Gulf Stream, and changeable above all. It gives average temperatures of 10 to 13 °C from June to August, 3 to 7 °C from December to February, 5 to 9 °C in April and May and 7 to 11 °C in September and October. Summer brings long daylight, the best walking conditions and the peak of the tourist season, with fog and wind still likely. Winter brings short days and Atlantic storms, and snow rarely lasts at sea level. Conditions vary from one island to the next, and the Tórshavn records that Faroe Islands: geography sets out show how little sunshine a year delivers.

The calendar has one fixed point that fills the capital. Ólavsøka, the national day on 29 July, commemorates the death of Saint Olaf, and the celebrations in Tórshavn run from the evening of 28 July to 31 July. The 29th opens the Løgting with a procession to the cathedral, the rowing races in the harbour draw the biggest crowds, the chain dance is held in Sjónleikarhúsið, and outdoor singing on Vaglið goes on past midnight. Many people wear national dress for it, and Faroe Islands: culture describes both the dance and the dried and matured foods, skerpikjøt among them, that a visitor meets at the table.