Inside the Volcanic Island Only 11 People Call Home

#Mykines #FaroeIslands #remoteislands
#VanishingPlaces #northatlantic

In 1925, one hundred and seventy-nine people lived on this island. Today, eleven remain.

The oldest is in her eighties. The youngest is twelve. There is almost no one in between.

This is Mykines — the westernmost of the Faroe Islands, a volcanic rock in the North Atlantic between Norway, Iceland, and Scotland. Ten square kilometres of basalt cliffs rising 560 metres straight out of an ocean that produces some of the most violent weather on Earth.

For most of the year, the eleven people who live here are completely cut off from the outside world. The ferry only runs from May through August. The rest of the year, the only connection is a government-funded helicopter service that operates when the weather allows it — which, in a North Atlantic winter, is often not at all. When the storms come through at three and four day intervals, neither ferry nor helicopter can fly. The village simply closes.

The island has no roads. No cars. No shops. A single church built in 1878. Forty houses, thirty-four of them empty for ten months of the year. Six houses are occupied year-round. Eleven people live in them.

Mykines has survived everything. The storm of 1595 drowned every working man on the island in a single afternoon. The plane crash of 1970. A century of population decline as families one by one decided to leave for the bigger Faroese islands. The basalt is sixty million years old, and the settlement has been here for over a thousand years.

But the question now is not whether the island will survive. The basalt will outlast every person reading this by an incomprehensible margin. The question is whether the twelve-year-old — the youngest resident on Mykines, the only child in a community of eleven — will choose to stay when the time comes for her to decide.

This is the story of a settlement that has refused to disappear, and the single thread holding it to existence.

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