Closed for maintenance: what the Faroe Islands' volunteer weekend can and cannot fix

In February 2019 the website of Visit Faroe Islands, the archipelago's tourism board, announced that the islands were "closed for maintenance". It was a paid promotional stunt, as a Nordic Labour Journal retrospective later noted, and it worked: more than 500 stories followed in the international press, and the World Economic Forum listed the idea among the five best planet initiatives of 2019 ⁴. Seven years on, the stunt has become an annual institution. This case study looks at what the programme actually does, what its record shows, and why the more consequential story of Faroese tourism management lies elsewhere.

A stunt that became an institution

The first edition, on 26–27 April 2019, closed major sites and attractions to ordinary visitors while hotels stayed open and flights kept operating; around 100 volunteers from abroad came to work on them ³. The programme has run every year since, including 2020, when only local volunteers took part because of Covid-19 ⁴. The 2026 working days ran from 30 April to 2 May ².

The word "closed" has always been a figure of speech. What closes is a selection of popular sites for a few days; the country does not ³⁵. That distinction matters for anyone tempted to cite the Faroes as a destination that has paused tourism. It has not.

How the weekend works

Visit Faroe Islands says it selects 80 to 100 volunteers from those who register, about 70% of them at random ¹. For 2025, Time Out reported 80 places: 50 drawn by lot and 30 chosen for relevant experience, with food and accommodation covered but flights not, and a requirement that participants be at least 18 and able to walk on uneven ground ⁵. A 2023 report found that Faroese applicants were accepted automatically, that volunteers stayed in local homes, and that work was supervised by local team leaders and specialists ⁶.

The tasks are manual and specific: drainage, path surfacing, fencing, signage and small viewpoints. The 2026 list included a fence intended to protect roughly 80% of the island of Koltur as a nature reserve, a new loop path on Nólsoy, the third year of work on a path at Gjógv that keeps walkers away from the gorge edge, a new path at Dalur on Sandoy designed to guide visitors while keeping the village quiet for residents, and a tree plantation at Viðareiði ². In 2023 crews installed people counters at free-entry sites, because many had no official visitor statistics at all ⁶.

What the record shows, and what it does not

The tourism board's figures, labelled as numbers from 2026 and apparently cumulative since 2019, are 72 projects at 46 sites on 12 islands, carried out by 754 foreign and 279 Faroese volunteers, with 44,625 applications received ¹. In 2025 alone, about 15,000 people reportedly applied for 80 foreign places ⁴. These are documented outputs, but they are first-party: the organiser counting its own work.

What the record does not contain is an independent evaluation of outcomes. We found no published assessment of trail condition, erosion or visitor flows at the sites before and after the work. A 2025 Nordregio study of Faroese tourism noted criticism of the programme's scope and effectiveness, and recorded an interviewee's view that the global attention it attracted had likely increased visitor numbers, the very pressure it was meant to address. The study still recommended expanding it, and separately called for better data collection and analysis ⁷.

Scale is part of the question. A few days' labour by around a hundred visitors sits against year-round use: hotel overnight stays by visitors from outside the Faroes and Denmark reached a record of about 113,500 in 2024, up 16% on the previous year ¹⁴.

Local views are mixed and unevenly recorded. Municipal voices in Sunda and Leirvík have welcomed trails that channel walkers away from fragile ground ⁴. A 2023 report found that farmers, who own much of the land, were not fully cooperating and complained of trampled grass and frightened sheep; one team leader told the reporter plainly that the programme was also marketing ⁶. Farmers' perspectives reach the public record mostly second-hand.

The heavier machinery: law, fees and landowners

The programme sits inside a broader strategy. Visit Faroe Islands' 2018 "Preservolution" strategy towards 2025 set out four cornerstones, including quality over quantity, tourism across all the islands and all year, and a common legislative framework. It also proposed a nature preservation fee for all visitors, paid into a national foundation ¹². Its successor, the Heim strategy to 2030, describes itself as developed bottom-up through thousands of conversations ¹³.

The legislative framework arrived in 2024. Parliament passed a sustainable tourism law with a two-thirds majority after several rounds of consultation, replacing access rules that dated from a 1937 agriculture law ⁹. Visitors aged 16 and over in paid accommodation pay DKK 20 a night, capped at DKK 200, with revenue earmarked for path maintenance and tourism planning ⁸. The fee has applied since 1 February 2026, collected by accommodation providers and paid into a government-managed fund ¹⁰. As legislated, it is narrower than the universal fee the 2018 strategy proposed. The law also allows charges where private paths or facilities are provided, restrictions on access during lambing, sheep gathering or bad weather, and limits on visitor numbers set by local communities ⁹.

Landowner charges were already a fact on the ground. Visit Faroe Islands lists DKK 200 for the walk to Kallur lighthouse on Kalsoy, DKK 200 for unguided access to Trælanípa, DKK 600 for a guided walk to the Drangarnir sea stacks, and DKK 400–500 for Mykines between May and August, with a guide mandatory on the island ¹¹. These charges, not the volunteer weekend, are where the price signal now sits.

What other destinations can take from it

Read on its own, Closed for Maintenance is a modest conservation-works programme with an outsized communications footprint. Read alongside the 2024 law, it looks like what it probably is: the visible, voluntary face of a system whose real levers are regulation, fees and landowner consent. The programme has shown that visitors will compete to do unpaid trail work and that this can generate goodwill and coverage. It has not shown, in any independent way, that it reduces pressure on Faroese landscapes.

The open questions are practical. Will the new sustainability fund publish what it spends and where? Will maintained sites be monitored over time? And will landowners' charges and the national fund work together, or in parallel? Those answers, more than the next round of applications, will determine whether the Faroese model deserves imitation.