🇬🇱 Greenland
Nuuk
Nuuk (Godthab in Danish) is the capital of Greenland and the world's smallest national capital, home to approximately 18,000 people on the southwest coast of the world's largest island at 64°N latitude — a place of extraordinary natural drama where the Nuuk Fjord system (one of the longest and deepest fjord networks in the world) meets an Arctic cityscape of colourful houses perched on rock outcrops above the Davis Strait. Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark and the site of one of the world's most visible climate change indicators: the Greenland Ice Sheet (1.7 million km², the second-largest ice mass on earth) is melting at an accelerating rate visible to the naked eye in comparisons of historical and contemporary photographs. Nuuk was founded by Hans Egede (the Norwegian-Danish Lutheran missionary) in 1728 and the relationship between Danish colonialism and the Inuit Greenlandic people is still being renegotiated — the Greenlandic self-government (2009) and the ongoing cultural revival of the Kalaallit (Greenlandic Inuit) identity express a people reclaiming their own narrative. The National Museum of Greenland in Nuuk holds the Qilakitsoq mummies (the 500-year-old naturally mummified bodies of eight Inuit from 1475, including an infant still in its sealskin clothing) and tells a story of Arctic human adaptation that is unlike anything in modern experience. Nuuk is also the gateway to the Greenlandic backcountry of dog sled expeditions, glacier trekking, whale watching in the fjord and the northern lights over the ice sheet.