“Do you see the black house over there? The one with the green roof, next to the yellow house?” asks Hanus Hojgaard, our Faroese guide, as we round a bend and spy a cluster of brightly painted timber-clad homes sprinkling the grassy slopes above the ocean. “That’s where I grew up; where I was born, in fact,” says Hanus, recalling his upbringing in this sleepy clifftop village called Rituvik, where his mother was also raised, one of 12 siblings whose collective longevity briefly put them in the Guinness World Records. “It was a combined 1067 years before the first one died,” says Hanus, as my gaze drifts from the red and yellow benches in the garden of his two-storey birthplace to the blues of the sky and the North Atlantic behind the hedges.
Beguiled by this absurdly idyllic setting, I wonder out loud if Hanus, now in his early 60s, still lives here: “No, but we own it,” he says. “It’s a great place to be in the summer. It’s on Airbnb: ‘House with a view’.
” A quick look online and I see it’s booked out for the next three months. But we don’t need a bed for the night. We’re visiting the Faroe Islands on a new expedition cruise with Ponant, a luxury French company that specialises in exotic, far-flung destinations.
And in Europe, there are few place more far-flung than the Faroes. Created by volcanic eruptions about 55 million years ago, and subsequently eroded by glaciers, winds and waves, this dreamlike archipelago sprouts almost halfway be.