50 km south of Nuuk, on a peaceful arm of the fjord, the split-open sheet-metal hulls reflect an impassive light. We cut the sailboat’s engine; now only the lapping of water at the bow breaks the silence. The impression of walking onto a post-apocalyptic film set is immediate – but the story that can be read behind these ruined facades is very real.
A Faroese outpost at the end of the world
It all began in 1927, when fishermen from the Faroe Islands obtained permission to set up a harbour of refuge in this sheltered fjord. They named the site Føroyingahavnin (‘Faroese harbour’), soon known by its Danish name, Færingehavn, or its Greenlandic name, Kangerluarsoruseq.
In 1953, NORDAFAR, an alliance of NORwegian, DAnish and FARoese interests, turned the simple landing stage into an industrial complex: engineering workshops, a power station, a hospital, a cinema and, above all, a gigantic filleting plant that would make the place the largest seafood factory in Greenland in the 1960s.
The golden age of the ‘kingdom of cod’
At the height of its boom, a flotilla of Faroese trawlers unloaded thousands of tonnes of Atlantic cod here. Hundreds of workers – seasonal sailors but also families settled all year round – lived in the colourful barracks, bought their groceries at the ‘Shop’, had their laundry done in the communal house or gathered for a film screening at the Norwegian Welfare House. Life was hard, but the money from the fish flowed freely. The objects still scattered through the buildings – an old snowmobile, a broken piano, packets of Aalborg Akvavit – bear witness to that vanished daily life.
When the sea empties, the village dies
From the 1970s, the catch curve reversed abruptly; industrial overfishing, cooling waters and shifting currents made cod stocks collapse along the whole north-western seaboard of the Atlantic. NORDAFAR did attempt a rapid switch to shrimp, but competition from better-equipped ports doomed the effort. The factory closed its doors in 1985, the company was declared bankrupt in 1989, and already the wind was seeping through the tin roofs.
One last winter, then silence
Deprived of work and services, families set sail for Nuuk or went back to the Faroe Islands. A few maintenance workers still scraped by until the end of the 1990s, but the last resident left Kangerluarsoruseq in 2009, sealing its fate as an Arctic ‘ghost town’ for good.
Visiting today
We arrived by sea. As the fjord closed behind the sailboat, I felt I was crossing an invisible border between two eras.
The jetty, broken up by successive winters, now allows only an uncertain mooring. The wooden and metal structures, eaten away by salt and frost, bend silently under the weight of the years.
Further on, the warehouses stand open to the four winds. In the damp half-light, you can still make out what kept the factory running: motionless conveyor belts, gaping cold stores, pine rafters blackened by time, hanging in the salty air.
Everywhere, a solitude so dense that it muffles footsteps and sounds. From time to time, the shrill cry of a fulmar cuts through it like a blade, or an arctic fox slips between two ruins.
An economy with a single resource
In a few collapsed walls, Kangerluarsoruseq tells what happens to a village that lives off a single resource: when the sea emptied, the village emptied with it.
The breeze is freshening. The tin roofs creak.
As we left the fjord, we watched Kangerluarsoruseq slowly fade into the mist. I thought of the fragility of Arctic communities, which still depend today on oceans that human activity has thrown off balance.
