Villages turning into holiday resorts

The number of houses with year-round occupants in small villages in on a steady decline.

Only 20 percent of the houses in the popular tourist village of Gásadalur have year-round occupants. The remaining houses are used as holiday homes.

The same applies in Elduvík, where four out of five houses are either vacant or used as holiday homes.

Similar figures can be found in Gjógv, Árnafjørður, Svínoy, Fugloy and Mikladalur.

 >> SEE ALSO More than 2,600 unoccupied houses

“The current rural areas development policy is 20 years old. It has never been more important than right now to upgrade this policy,” says Olga Biskupstø, chairwoman of the outlying islands association.

The association is worried that increasing attention from foreign property investors is pushing house prices up, which will push local people even further back in the property queue.

 >> SEE ALSO Tourism is becoming a burden on small islands

“For the past 20 years we have been asking the authorities to ensure access to residential houses on the outlying islands so that the next generation and others are given the opportunity to settle down there if they should wish to do so,” the association wrote in a 2018 press release.

After repeated calls from municipalities for clearer regulations on the rights of foreign real estate investors, a law was passed last month which states that foreign nationals with no affiliation to the Danish Kingdom can no longer purchase property in the Faroes without specific government permission.

Read the Faroese version of this article here.

More Faroese News in English.