We stared at the grubby-green mountainside, propped up on our tools – spades, pick axes, a curious sort of shovel – with so little clue what to do, but so much enthusiasm to do it.
The task was to cut out a path to the summit of a peak called Klakkur, currently (and perhaps always) hidden in the clouds 150 metres above, but with an estimated zero construction experience among us, how to start was anyone’s guess. Dig? It seemed a good – and the only – place to begin and so, with a furious wind beating our backs, I took a tentative mark on the sodden turf and dug.
Only 100 people were allowed to visit the Faroe Islands last weekend. They were not tourists but volunteer “workers” invited in the name of sustainability, and I was among them. In February, the country’s tourism chiefs declared that it would be “closed for maintenance” for three days in late April and asked if a century of unskilled labourers fancied helping out in exchange for bed and board. More than 3,000 applied and the quota, which the organisers feared would never be reached, was filled in days.
Cut adrift in the Atlantic, half-way between Scotland and Iceland, the Faroes is a new front in the global battle against overtourism. A couple of decades ago, just a handful of visitors wrestled their way to the smattering of 18 roughly-hewn islands each year. But a growing desire to see the unseen and explore the unexplored is driving more and more tourists to seek out its baffling landscapes. In 2013, 68,000 made the trip. Last year the figure reached 110,000, more than double the Faroes’ resident population, raising fears about how long its unspoilt natural attractions would remain unspoilt.
Source link : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/faroe-islands/articles/faroes-islands-closed-for-maintenance/
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Publish date : 2019-04-30 03:00:00
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