Vestmanna
"The cliffs at Vestmanna don't feel like scenery — they feel like a different jurisdiction, one that birds administer and you are briefly permitted to enter."
The boat left Vestmanna harbour on a morning that was technically overcast but possessed of a strange silver light that bounced off the water and off the cliff faces in a way that made everything look lit from the inside. There were eight of us in the small RIB, and the captain drove it with the confidence of someone for whom these waters are as familiar as a car park, threading the bow into narrow channels between cliff walls that rose fifty meters, then a hundred, then stopped being something you could measure with any sense of useful proportion and became simply vertical.
Vestmanna itself is a small town on the northwest coast of Streymoy — a working port with a fish processing plant, a harbour lined with the practical architecture of fishing communities everywhere, and a main street whose shops exist for the people who actually live there rather than for the people who come to photograph it. I had coffee in the only café before boarding the boat and ate a slice of klakkavøfflur — Faroese waffles with cream and jam — that was dense and satisfying in the way food tastes when you are about to go out into cold air and want something to set against it. The woman behind the counter had heard of Paris but not, it appeared, of most of the other places I mentioned in a brief attempt at conversation.
The cliffs are what everything here is organised around. The Vestmanna Bird Cliffs — Vestmannabjørgini — run for several kilometres along the coast and host tens of thousands of nesting seabirds: guillemots packed so densely on ledges that they appear improbable, kittiwakes calling in that thin repeating cry I find both beautiful and slightly unhinged after long exposure, fulmars gliding in the updrafts with the effortless competence of birds who live on cliff air and have nothing left to prove. The boat went under overhangs where the cliff curved above us like the interior of a cathedral arch and the sound of the engine echoed back strangely. Inside one sea cave, the captain cut the engine and we drifted in the sound of water and rock and birds above us in the dark, and no one said anything for a while.
I went back to Vestmanna on my last evening on the islands — not for the boat tour again, but just to sit on the harbour wall with a sandwich and watch the light leave the cliff faces from a distance. The seabirds were still circling. The fish plant was doing whatever fish plants do in the evening. A man walked past with a dog and nodded, and I nodded back, and we had that small transaction that happens in small places and means nothing specific and somehow everything general about what it means to be somewhere real.
When to go: Boat tours operate May through September. June and July offer the fullest bird activity and the longest evening light on the cliffs. Book the morning departure when the silver overcast light is at its most particular — midday on clear days can be harsh. The cliffs are visible year-round from shore, but the cave passages and close cliff approach are only possible by boat.