The Most Beautiful Places in Greenland
7 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Greenland are Greenland ice sheet, Ilulissat Icefjord and Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq). The list covers 7 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Greenland is the largest island on Earth, and roughly four-fifths of it lies under a single ice sheet up to about three kilometres thick. That ice pushes outward toward the coast, where it squeezes through gaps in the mountains as outlet glaciers and breaks off into the sea as icebergs. Only a narrow rim of rock, fjord and tundra stays free of ice, settled for thousands of years by Inuit peoples and, for several centuries in the Middle Ages, by Norse farmers.
The Greenland ice sheet itself is the defining feature: a white plateau stretching for more than two thousand kilometres from south to north, the second-largest body of ice after Antarctica. On the west coast near Ilulissat, Sermeq Kujalleq, also known as the Jakobshavn Glacier, is one of the fastest-moving glaciers in the world. It feeds the Ilulissat Icefjord, a UNESCO site packed with icebergs so large that many run aground at the fjord's mouth before drifting out into Disko Bay.
Further north, the Eqi Glacier ends in a high calving front where blocks of ice crash into the water. Uummannaq Island is dominated by a steep, heart-shaped mountain of reddish gneiss rising directly behind its small town. In the far south, the uninhabited island of Uunartoq has natural hot springs feeding a pool where bathers can sit in warm water while icebergs drift past offshore, a rare combination in a land where geothermal heat is otherwise hardly felt.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Greenland ice sheet | Glacier | |
| 2 | Ilulissat Icefjord | Fjord | ✓ |
| 3 | Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq) | Glacier | |
| 4 | Tasermiut Fjord | Fjord | |
| 5 | Uunartoq | Hot spring | |
| 6 | Uummannaq Island | Island | |
| 7 | Eqi Glacier | Glacier |
01 Greenland ice sheet
Greenland76.700° N 41.200° W
Chmee2 / Valtameri · CC BY 3.0 Numbers struggle to do this thing justice. It covers about 80 percent of the world's largest island, stretches roughly 2,220 km from north to south, and holds an average of 1,500 meters of ice on top of the bedrock — in places, over 3 kilometers of it stacked up.
Did you know? Ice cores drilled here preserve lead pollution from metal smelting in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire.
02 Ilulissat Icefjord
Greenland69.150° N 49.550° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by SarahNic from Pixabay Ilulissat Icefjord is where one of the fastest glaciers on the planet meets the sea. Sermeq Kujalleq, also called Jakobshavn Isbræ, pushes out of the Greenland ice sheet at a rate usually measured in tens of metres per day, and the fjord it feeds carries its icebergs some 40 km west to Disko Bay.
Did you know? The glacier drains about 6.5 percent of the entire Greenland ice sheet, the highest outflow of any glacier draining it.
03 Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq)
Greenland69.983° N 50.117° W
Giles Laurent · CC BY-SA 4.0 Sermeq Kujalleq — "the southern glacier" in Greenlandic, Jakobshavn in Danish — is the fastest-moving large glacier known. Where it leaves the Greenland ice sheet and enters its fjord, the ice has been clocked at more than 45 metres a day on annual average, faster still in summer.
Did you know? Ice discharged by this one glacier accounted for roughly 4 per cent of global sea-level rise during the 20th century.
04 Tasermiut Fjord
Greenland60.270° N 44.780° W
amanderson2 · CC BY 2.0 Tasermiut Fjord cuts some 70 km into the mountains of southernmost Greenland, and few places on the island pack so much vertical granite into a single view.
Did you know? Ketil's western face is a sheer granite wall more than 1,000 metres high, and the peak was first climbed in 1974.
05 Uunartoq
Greenland60.500° N 45.333° W
Svickova · Public domain Off the southern tip of Greenland, at the mouth of a fjord the Norse called Siglufjord, lies the uninhabited island of Uunartoq — a name that simply means "the hot one".
Did you know? The geologist Carl Ludwig Giesecke made the first temperature measurement in 1806, finding about 37 °C, and noted that locals washed clothes there rather than bathing.
06 Uummannaq Island
Greenland70.703° N 52.133° W
Image by jonasmtbxdk from Pixabay A heart-shaped mountain of granite and gneiss rises sheer out of the fjord ice, and at its foot, on the island's southern tip, the houses of a small Arctic town cling to bare rock.
Did you know? The sun stays below the horizon here from early November to early February, while the midnight sun shines from mid-May to late July.
07 Eqi Glacier
Greenland69.817° N 50.067° W
David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada · CC BY 2.0 In De Quervain Bay, at the north-eastern end of the Ata Sund fjord north of Disko Bay, the Eqi Glacier, in Greenlandic Eqip Sermia, ends in a wall of ice more than three kilometres wide, rising between 50 and 170 metres above the water.
Did you know? Between 1912 and 2006 the ice at the front moved only 2.5 to 5 metres a day, a fraction of the speeds it reaches today.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Greenland?
- On our list, Greenland ice sheet ranks first, followed by Ilulissat Icefjord and Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq).
- How thick is the Greenland ice sheet?
- At its thickest, the Greenland ice sheet is about three kilometres deep. If it melted completely, global sea level would rise by roughly seven metres.
- Why is the Ilulissat Icefjord so full of icebergs?
- It is fed by Sermeq Kujalleq, one of the fastest and most productive glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere. A shallow moraine at the fjord's mouth traps the largest icebergs until they break up or float free.
- Why is Greenland called Greenland?
- According to the Icelandic sagas, Erik the Red gave the island its name around 985, reasoning that an attractive name would draw settlers to his new colony.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Greenland?
- In our collection, the places in Greenland are most often glaciers (3), fjords (2), hot springs (1) and islands (1).
- How many places are on this list in Greenland?
- The list covers 7 places.