Lítla Dímun
Interesting facts
- Although no one has ever lived there permanently, the islet is privately owned: it was sold at an auction held in Hvalba in 1852 for 4,820 Danish rigsdaler.
- In 1918 the Danish schooner Caspe, carrying a cargo of salt, was driven ashore here, and its six crew survived 17 days stranded on the island.
- Its cliffs hold some 10,000 breeding pairs of Atlantic puffins and about 5,000 pairs of European storm petrels, earning it Important Bird Area status.
- Despite covering only about 0.8 square kilometres, the island climbs to 414 metres at its summit, Slættirnir, and its lower third is sheer cliff.
- The islet appears in the medieval Færeyinga saga as the scene of a clash involving the chieftain Brestir Sigmundsson and the men of Gøta.
- The explorer Fridtjof Nansen suggested that the name Dímun, shared with neighbouring Stóra Dímun, may come from a Celtic place-name meaning "double neck".
- After the autumn round-up the sheep are carried off in small skiffs and landed at the wharf in Hvalba on the neighbouring island of Suðuroy.
Why it is worth it
Lítla Dímun is the smallest of the Faroe Islands' eighteen main islands and the only one with no permanent human population — less than a square kilometre of steep grass and rock rising straight out of the sea between Suðuroy and Stóra Dímun. It's famous locally for something almost meteorological: the islet is small and steep enough that it regularly forms and holds its own solitary cloud cap even on clear days elsewhere, giving it a look in photographs of a place perpetually wearing its own private weather.
The sheep on it today are not, as many retellings assume, a living relic of some ancient unbroken bloodline. The islet's original sheep — a small, dark, short-woolled feral breed closely related to the primitive Soay sheep of Scotland's St Kilda — was hunted to extinction; the last of them were shot in the 1860s. The sheep grazing there now are ordinary domestic Faroese sheep, introduced afterward to replace a population that had already been wiped out, a distinction that gets lost in most casual accounts of the island.
Getting to those sheep is still an operation. Because Lítla Dímun has no harbour and only steep, exposed landing points, farmers can only put ashore in calm weather, sailing over in wooden boats with rowing skiffs in tow. Once landed, around forty people form a human chain across the narrow island and drive roughly two hundred sheep into a holding pen for the annual autumn gathering — a piece of logistics that hasn't changed much in character even as the flock itself did, generations ago.
Getting there
42 km from Tórshavn. Vágar Airport (FAE) is about 56 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Beinisvørð 23.3 km · cliff
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Lítla Dímun is a small, uninhabited island between the islands of Suðuroy and Stóra Dímun in the Faroe Islands. It is the smallest of the main 18 islands, being less than a square kilometre in area, and is the only uninhabited one. The island can be seen from the villages of Hvalba and Sandvík.
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