The Faroe Islands trip is one of those journeys that does not fade from memory easily. They’re the kind that promises to stay with you in your memory and in your retina for life. And there is something magical about discovering something for the first time, especially when you do it before the rest. Let’s not kid ourselves, I wasn’t the first to visit them, but I am among the roughly 130,000 people who each year venture to explore this archipelago in the North Atlantic. A figure that sounds almost glorious next to an increasingly crowded Iceland, which has already surpassed two million visitors annually in recent times.
The letter I hold in my hands is everything I wish I had read before setting out at the end of August toward what for the collective imagination had until recently been the end of the world. But I don’t want to stop there. This is also an invitation to travel with purpose and with the utmost respect for everything we may encounter along the way. Whether people, animals, or nature in its fullest expression.
With the example of the Faroe Islands, another way of traveling becomes possible, because here mass tourism has not yet managed to do its mischief (we are still in time). And that, in these times, is a genuine chimera. That is why this journey is so magical, because it returns us to a way of traveling that is increasingly forgotten, where the present, solitude, and the importance of what surrounds us promise to accompany us at every step of the way. As if we were continually in the painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich, with that melancholy of the landscape before our eyes.
That is why, yes, let us recommend them. But let us do it softly, almost in a whisper, so as not to disturb anyone. Let us do it with respect, like someone who still resists losing faith in a humanity increasingly determined to destroy what deserves to be cared for.
