Hotel Foroyar

Hotel Foroyar

Hotel Føroyar climbs the hillside above Tórshavn in three long, grass-roofed tiers, arranged so that most of its 200 rooms look out over the harbour, the old town of Tinganes, and the island of Nólsoy beyond. Its history goes back to 1933, when a Faroese hotelier opened a small guesthouse at Kongabrúgvin in the centre of town; the insurance company Tryggingarsambandið Føroyar bought the building in 1947 and ran it alongside its own offices through the following decades, until the operation had outgrown the site and moved, in 1983, into a new building higher on the hill, designed by the Danish firm Friis & Moltke A/S to follow the contour of the slope rather than sit above it. A second expansion, begun in 2018 and finished in 2020, took the hotel from 160 rooms to its current 200 and added a run of Executive Suites; the Ress spa followed in 2021, built into the rock behind the main building. Since 2024 the hotel has operated under Nordic Hotels & Resorts, the group's first property in the Faroe Islands. Inside, the corridors run long and dark before opening into brighter rooms, a sequence the hotel itself compares to the sea caves along the coast; guest rooms carry furnishings by Philippe Starck and the Danish house Montana, in the greys and browns of the surrounding moor, with original work by Faroese artists on the walls in place of framed prints. Ruts, the hotel's restaurant, serves a pescatarian and vegetarian set menu built around the fjord view; downstairs, the 1933 Bar & Café takes its name from the year the original guesthouse opened and functions as the more local of the two rooms. Ress, reached by a corridor cut through rock, offers a Rasul mud treatment, hot stone massage, and an infrared sauna, and sits alongside eight meeting rooms that keep the hotel's conference trade steady through the shoulder seasons. What Hotel Føroyar offers is scale and outlook rather than intimacy. This is the hotel visiting dignitaries and national sports teams are put into, the one whose reception desk is built for a coach party as easily as a couple, and the atmosphere reads accordingly: efficient, well run, a little corporate. The compensation is the position; few hotel windows in the North Atlantic hold a capital, a fjord, and open sea in the same frame, and a footpath through a small wood behind the hotel gets you into Tórshavn's old town in under fifteen minutes, faster than the road. You should not come if you want a small, considered property where every room differs and someone remembers your name from the year before; this is a 200-room hotel built for volume, and weddings, conferences, and coach groups fill it as readily as leisure travellers, which shows in a lobby built more for throughput than for lingering. You should come for the view from nearly every room, for a Ress treatment after a day on the moor, and for a base close enough to walk into old Tórshavn without paying old-town prices for the room. The short version: A 200-room hillside hotel above Tórshavn, built in 1983 by Friis & Moltke A/S in grass-roofed tiers, expanded in 2020, with the Ress spa, the Ruts restaurant, and a business that runs closer to corporate than boutique.