Kalsoy

Lia found Kalsoy on a map months before we ever set foot in the Faroes, tracing her finger along its impossibly thin shape and calling it “the flute island.” She wasn’t wrong. Four single-lane tunnels blast straight through the basalt to connect the villages strung along its spine, and driving them felt less like a road trip and more like descending into the mountain itself. One stretch ran unlit for well over a kilometer — just our headlights, wet rock walls close enough to touch, and the occasional passing bay where we’d flash our lights and wait to see if anything was coming the other way. I gripped the wheel the whole time. Lia just laughed and said it was the most Faroese thing we’d do all trip.

We’d booked a guesthouse in Klaksvík the night before and caught the first car ferry over, determined to beat the tour buses to Trøllanes, the village at the island’s very end. The road there is barely wider than the car, hugging cliffs that drop straight into the sea, and by the time we parked near the last houses my hands were still slightly unclenching from the tunnels. From Trøllanes it’s about an hour on foot along a grassy ridge, sheep watching us the whole way, until the land narrows to almost nothing and the Kallur Lighthouse appears — white and red against the green, standing since 1927 above cliffs that plunge 600 meters into the North Atlantic.

The wind up there nearly took my hat, and Lia had to shout over it just to point out the neighboring islands stacked on the horizon like cardboard cutouts. We sat below the lighthouse eating the rúgbrað sandwiches we’d packed that morning, not saying much, because there wasn’t much that needed saying. Back down in Trøllanes, we stopped at the small memorial bench installed after the village hosted filming for the 2019 Bond movie “No Time to Die” — a strange, slightly funny footnote for a place this remote and this quiet, a handful of turf-roofed houses at the edge of the world suddenly linked to Daniel Craig.

Driving back through the tunnels felt easier the second time, though I still slowed to a crawl whenever the darkness stretched on longer than I expected. Kalsoy stuck with me more than almost anywhere else in the Faroes — maybe because reaching it takes real effort, tunnel after tunnel, ridge after ridge, until you’re standing at a lighthouse that feels like the edge of everything.

When to go: Aim for June through August, when the long daylight hours give you the safest footing and the best odds of clear skies for the ridge hike out to Kallur Lighthouse.