Sermermiut is one of Greenland’s most famous abandoned places due to its proximity to Ilulissat icefjord and its long Inuit history. Going back 4,500 years, the early Dorset and Thule Inuit cultures took residence by Sermermiut. Hunting has always been good in this area due to its location next to the icefjord, which has varied animal and marine life.

Sermermiut was first excavated in 1952 and then in 1983, where evidence of many different cultures was found. It is now part of a UNESCO World Heritage area, and you can access it via a wooden walkway. At the end of the walkway, you get to Nakkaavik, which means “the place where you fall.” The name comes from a time when the elderly threw themselves off a cliff during famines. Nakkaavik was featured in Season 4 of the popular TV series “Borgen“.

Assaqutaq is yet another settlement abandoned as people chose or were forced to move to the larger towns to find work. Today, you will experience the old church, the former fish factory, and several private houses. The cemetery is also well worth a visit.

Today, this picturesque settlement is used as a summer camp for the local primary schools. In summer, Assaqutaq really comes to life as people from nearby Sisimiut go to fish ammassat (capelin). At this time, there are also good chances of spotting humpback whales as they love the ammassat as much as we do.

Qoornoq is an abandoned settlement in the Nuuk Fjord. It has become quite a popular place for the descendants of the inhabitants of the former settlement, and others, to go to in the summer.

Qoornoq was also one of those settlements that was closed because a workforce was needed elsewhere. In the case of Qoornoq, the inhabitants moved to the newly built apartment blocks in Nuuk, and many of them got to work in the new fish processing plant.

Qoornoq is located on a small island in the huge fjord system and is easily accessible on day tours from Nuuk. One of the more interesting features is the remains of a small railway used in the 1950s to transport fish to the small harbor.

Kangerluarsoruseq or Færingehavn (or Nordáfar) is an abandoned settlement about 50 kilometers south of Nuuk. It was a settlement originally built by Faroese fishermen and was used until the early 1990s. The place is an oil depository today but the last person to live there left in 2009.

Here’s an interesting link from a person who went there by boat from Nuuk.

Kangeq is a former island settlement. The island was formerly known as Haabets Ø (The Island of Hope) as the colonialist Hans Egede settled here for seven miserable years from 1721-28. In 1728 Hans upped and relocated to today’s Nuuk.

To Greenlanders, Kangeq is known as the birthplace of Aron from Kangeq, who was a hunter, painter, and historian. He lived from 1822-1869, and his many detailed drawings, woodcuts, and watercolors have shown us how life was lived in old times.

Today, Kangeq draws mainly tourists interested in history, and it also stood in for Nuuk in the Danish film, The Experiment, back in 2010.

Old Narsaq is found right on the border of Narsaq, lodged between the town and the heliport. Here you will find several old ruins from an old Greenlandic settlement before Narsaq became a trading colony in 1830. Some of the ruins are later, though, as many people lived in peat houses into the 20th Century.

If you go to the nearby Narsaq Kujalleq and also the area around the fish factory in Narsaq, you will also come across remains of Norse farms.

Like Qullissat, this small town also closed when the mine ran dry. This happened in 1987 after the mine had been operating since 1856. The coveted mineral was cryolite which is used when making aluminum. The mine was very interesting to the Americans during WWII (read our article about “The Good Traitor”). Ivittuut is located close to the now also abandoned Flådestation Grønnedal, or Kangillinnguit in Greenland, the Danish navy’s former Command Central in Greenland (which relocated to Nuuk in 2012). The huge mine of Ivittuut was filled with water to avoid people falling into a very deep hole. The last two families left Ivittuut in 2000.

There are many rare minerals to be found in the Ivittuut area, and close by, you also find Ikka with its unique underwater stalagmites.

According to legend, a huge hospital was abandoned overnight in Narsarsuaq, leaving plates with food on the tables, as we see in the movies. During and after WWII, the Americans built several large bases in Greenland, and during the war, Bluie West 1, as the base at Narsarsuaq was called, was the largest town in Greenland. In the early 1950s, a huge hospital was also built in the Hospital Valley (a place we now call the Flower Valley). In Narsarsuaq, we still wallow in the ghost stories about this place.

Today, only a stone chimney is left.

Someone with irony dubbed the waste from the American base that polluted the area around Bluie East Two “American Flowers.”

As an airbase, Bluie East Two was never very significant, yet the users of the air base managed to leave behind around 200,000 oil drums that polluted the area for decades. A major clean-up is now taking place. Some historians, and local tour operators, argue that we should leave some of the oil drums as a testament to the area’s history.

Skjoldungen or Saqqisikuik was a settlement on the east coast of Greenland which is now used as an oil depository, fishing grounds, and also a place where people from Tasiilaq go to get angelica. The surroundings are almost otherworldly beautiful. The area is lush with towering peaks. The area has been inhabited several times, most lately from the 1930s until 1964, when the inhabitants were relocated. This happened mainly due to a political wish to concentrate Greenland’s inhabitants in larger towns.

However, there’s a big “but” to this official story as there, supposedly, have been several sightings of an original, forgotten Inuit tribe in the area.

When Thule Air Base was built in 1952-3, the people of Pituffik and nearby Umanak/Dundas were displaced from their homes (and excellent hunting grounds). A new town of 27 houses, Qaanaaq, was built for the locals, using the American grid system for town planning). Being displaced is a traumatic experience, and it lead to a long legal battle for the people of Dundas.

Pituffik was also the site of the original trading station formed by polar explorers Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen in 1910.