Múli
Múli is an abandoned hamlet on the northeastern tip of Borðoy island in the northern Faroe Islands, sitting at the foot of steep mountains with the sea visible on three sides. The settlement dates to at least the 14th century, is mentioned in the Hundabrævið, a legal document from the 1300s, and remained inhabited until the early 2000s. It was the last village in the entire Faroe Islands to receive electricity, in 1970, and a road was built shortly after to try to prevent the population from leaving. The road came too late. The last permanent residents left around 2002, and today the handful of remaining buildings serve as summer houses for former residents and their families. The mountains around Múli form one of the most dramatic backdrops of any village site in the archipelago.
The Last Village in the Faroe Islands to Get Electricity, Abandoned Shortly Afterwards
Múli occupies a narrow strip of land at the far northeastern edge of Borðoy, one of the northern islands of the Faroe archipelago. The settlement has been inhabited since at least the 14th century, when it appears in the Hundabrævið, one of the oldest surviving Faroese legal documents, in a section about the keeping of sheepdogs. The village never held more than around 25 residents at its peak and always teetered on the edge of viability, its isolation making it one of the hardest communities in the islands to maintain. During the Black Death around 1347, sick villagers were quarantined in a valley above the settlement in a building called Tobbabúð, and traces of this history are still visible in the landscape. The mountains surrounding the village are among the steepest in the northern islands and form the last habitat in the Faroe Islands of a contiguous population of Arctic Willow.
Electricity arrived in Múli in 1970, the last village in the entire Faroe Islands to be connected to the grid. Rather than stabilising the population, the connection came too late. A road was built shortly after to link Múli to the nearest settlement of Norðdepil, 6 kilometres to the south, in another attempt to halt the drift away. The last permanent residents left around 2002, and the village is now considered abandoned, though a handful of former residents return each summer to stay in what were their family homes. The houses stand intact, the grass is cropped by sheep that still graze the surrounding hillsides, and the village retains the quality of a place paused rather than destroyed. Múli features in the Faroese crime drama TROM, which used the settlement as a filming location and brought it to a wider international audience.
Múli is reached via Road 743, a 6-kilometre unpaved track from Norðdepil that is one of the very few unsealed roads in the Faroe Islands. The road can be rough and should be driven carefully, particularly after rain. From Norðdepil, the drive takes around 15 to 20 minutes. Alternatively, the village can be seen from across the water from Viðareiði on Viðoy island, the northernmost settlement in the Faroes, where viewpoints on the coastline face directly toward Múli sitting below the mountains of Borðoy. The nearest town is Klaksvík on Borðoy, the second-largest town in the Faroe Islands, about 30 minutes by road from Norðdepil.
