You reach Rømø by a long causeway that runs dead straight across the tidal flats of the Wadden Sea, and the drive itself prepares you for what the island is about: enormous, flat, mostly sky. Lia and I came down through the marshy southwest corner of Jutland on a blustery spring day, crossed the dam with the wind shoving the car sideways, and arrived on an island that felt less like solid land and more like a sandbar the sea had agreed to leave alone for now.
A beach you can drive onto
Rømø has one genuinely startling feature: its west-coast beach, Sønderstrand, is so broad — several kilometres of hard-packed sand at low tide — that you are allowed to drive your car straight out onto it and park facing the sea. I had read about this and assumed it would feel like a car park. It does not. The beach is so vast that even with a scatter of cars and a few kite-buggies tearing along in the distance, you can walk five minutes and be entirely, ringingly alone, with the flat grey North Sea ahead and the dunes a far-off line behind.
The wind here is relentless and it is the whole point. This is one of northern Europe’s great spots for kitesurfing and land-yachting, and we spent a happy hour just watching the kites — huge crescents of colour hauling people across the sand at frankly alarming speed. Lia wanted to try. I pointed out neither of us had ever done it and the wind could have launched a small building. We watched instead, eating cold smørrebrød out of the boot of the car with the doors blocking the worst of the gusts.
Heather, captains’ houses, and oysters
Inland, Rømø is heath and pine plantation and low dunes, laced with cycle paths, and the smell when the sun comes out is heather and salt and warm pine resin all at once. The village of Toftum holds the island’s oddest treasure: Kommandørgården, a preserved 18th-century sea captain’s farmhouse from the days when Rømø’s men sailed off on Greenland whaling expeditions and came home rich. The Dutch tiles lining the walls inside are spoils from those voyages — a tiny island that once had its fingers in the whole North Atlantic.
The Wadden Sea around the island is a UNESCO site and a feeding ground for staggering numbers of migrating birds; in autumn you can watch the sort sol, the “black sun”, when starlings mass in their tens of thousands over the marshes at dusk. We were too early in the year for that, but at low tide we joined a guided walk out onto the seabed itself, squelching across flats that had been under the sea an hour before, the guide digging up lugworms and tiny oysters and explaining, in unhurried Danish-accented English, how the whole thing drains and floods twice a day.
Bring a windbreaker you actually trust. Come for the space and the sky rather than the swimming — the North Sea here is bracing and the beach is more about wind than water. We left two days later, hair stiff with salt, oddly scoured clean by the place.