The Most Remote and Beautiful Places to Visit in Northern Europe

The Lofoten Islands, Norway

The Lofoten Islands sit above the Arctic Circle off the northwest coast of Norway, and they look like nothing else in Europe. Dramatic peaks rise almost vertically from the sea, small fishing villages cling to narrow strips of land between mountains and water, and the light — whether the long golden hours of midsummer or the blue dusk of early autumn — gives everything an otherworldly quality that photographs struggle to capture accurately.

Getting there requires effort — a flight to Bodø or Harstad followed by a ferry, or a very long drive north — but that effort is part of what makes it feel special. The islands are connected by bridges and tunnels, so once you arrive a rental car gives you access to beaches, viewpoints, and small harbours that most visitors never reach. Norway has some of the finest walking terrain in Europe, and the Lofotens are no exception. Travellers who want to explore the mountains seriously often extend their trip to the mainland and join Norway hiking tours that take in the fjord country further south.

“The Lofoten Islands look like the world was still being assembled when someone decided to stop and leave it exactly as it was.”

Finnish Lapland

Finnish Lapland is one of the emptiest places in Europe. The region covers roughly a third of Finland’s total area but is home to only about 180,000 people, which means vast stretches of boreal forest, fell landscape, and river valley where you can walk for hours without seeing another person. In winter it is famous for the northern lights and for reindeer herding culture that has survived largely unchanged for centuries. In summer the midnight sun keeps the sky bright around the clock, and the hiking season on the fells is long and genuinely rewarding.

The national parks here — Urho Kekkonen, Pallas-Yllästunturi, and Lemmenjoki — are among the largest in Europe and have extensive networks of wilderness huts where hikers can spend the night for a small fee. The landscapes are subtle rather than dramatic, but they have a stillness and scale that is difficult to find anywhere else on the continent.

The Faroe Islands

The Faroe Islands occupy a patch of the North Atlantic halfway between Norway and Iceland, and they have been drawing a growing number of travellers in recent years who are looking for something genuinely unlike anywhere else. The islands are small, green, and extraordinarily steep, with sea cliffs that drop hundreds of metres to churning water below and waterfalls that pour directly into the ocean. The weather is famously unpredictable — four seasons in a single afternoon is a local cliché that turns out to be accurate — but that unpredictability is part of the atmosphere.

The capital Tórshavn is among the smallest capitals in the world, with a turf-roofed old town that can be walked end to end in twenty minutes. Beyond it, the islands reward slow exploration on foot. The hiking trails here are unmarked by continental European standards, which means navigation requires attention and the sense of remoteness is entirely genuine.

Inland Iceland

Iceland’s coastal ring road has become well-travelled over the past decade, but the interior of the island remains one of the most remote landscapes in Europe. The Highlands — accessible only in summer when the F-roads are open to four-wheel drive vehicles — are a vast, unpopulated plateau of lava fields, geothermal hot springs, and glacial rivers that must be forded rather than bridged. There are no towns, no services, and very little infrastructure. It is not a place for the underprepared, but for those who go equipped and informed, it offers a sense of solitude and raw natural scale that is genuinely rare.

The two main highland routes — the Kjölur and Sprengisandur tracks — both cross the interior between the north and south coasts and can be driven in a long day or broken into two with a night at one of the unmanned highland huts maintained by the Icelandic Touring Association. Either way, the experience is memorable in a way that the more familiar coastal route simply cannot match.