The largest island in the world, with one of the smallest populations: Greenland is a world where completely different dimensions apply.

Dominating its entire landscape, environment and lifestyle is the ice cap stretching down from the North Pole, up to 2 million years old and 3 km thick in places, a magical symbol of nature's purity and power. Ice both covers Greenland and shapes it, calving gigantic icebergs into dramatic and intricate fjord systems that, aeons ago, it also carved out. And the glacier has shaped the people who live around it, self-sufficient and in harmony with nature.

Rich, colourful and thriving, lnuit culture includes a strong handicraft tradition using local materials, ornate costumes, ancient dances and songs, and the basic survival tasks: hunting and kayaking. lnuit culture in Greenland is both ancient and new: Europeans first saw their east' coast settlements late last century, when the last wave of lnuit crossed the pack ice from Canada. Greenland was first settled - and named - by Europeans when Erik the Red sailed from Iceland in 982, to the southern part where Viking ruins are still found. From there, his son Leif the Lucky and other explorers ventured on to visit America, 500 years before Columbus. The Norse settlement disappeared around 1500. In the year 2000, Greenland will be celebrating Leifs voyages, and replicas are being built of a Viking church and farmhouse in Qassiarsuk, where he lived.

For all its ice and rock, in places Greenland is rich in vegetation unencroached upon by modern man, and thriving wildlife. Whales sport and blow in its waters, seals bask and swim along the shores, and arctic species such as reindeer and musk oxen thrive inland. Millions of sea birds fill the skies, as well as majestic birds of prey.

Greenland divides into four distinct parts whose local culture, climate, history and prehistory all differ sharply. What they share is the glacier and sea that they live from, the long summer daylight that brings the midnight sun, the timelessness of an environment that remains untouched by man, although continuously being transformed by nature. And they share what much of the world has lost: peacefulness, purity, natural grandeur, wildlife in the true wild, life in harmony with nature.

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