Greenland is divided into five municipalities and two unincorporated areas. The municipalities are Avannaata, Kujalleq, Qeqertalik, Qeqqata, and Sermersooq. Northeast Greenland National Park is a huge unincorporated area that is outside the municipalities and larger than any of them. Pituffik Space Base is a small unincorporated enclave surrounded by the Avannaata municipality and administered by the United States Space Force.
Nuuk (Greenlandic pronunciation: [nuːk] ; Danish: Nuuk, formerly Godthåb [ˈkʌtˌhɔˀp]) is the capital and most populous city of Greenland, an autonomous territory in the Kingdom of Denmark. Nuuk is the seat of government and the territory's largest cultural and economic center. It is also the seat of government for the Sermersooq municipality. In January 2025, it had a population of 20,113—more than a third of the territory's population—making it one of the smallest capital cities in the world by population.
The city was founded in 1728 by the Danish-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede when he relocated from the earlier Hope Colony (Haabets Koloni), where he had arrived in 1721; the governor Claus Paarss was part of the relocation. The new colony was placed at the Inuit settlement of Nûk and named Godthaab ("Good Hope"). "Nuuk" is the Greenlandic word for "cape" and is commonly found in Greenlandic place names. It is so named because of its position at the end of the Nuup Kangerlua fjord on the Labrador Sea's eastern shore. Its latitude, at 64°11' N, makes it the world's northernmost capital, a few kilometres farther north than Reykjavík. When home rule was established in 1979, the authorization of place names was transferred to Greenlandic authorities, who preferred Greenlandic names to Danish ones. The name Godthåb mostly went out of use over the next two decades.
Nuup Kangerlua is a 160 km (99.4 mi) long fjord in the Sermersooq municipality in southwestern Greenland. It was formerly known by its colonial name as Godthaab Fjord (Danish: Godthåbsfjorden), Gilbert Sound and Baal's River.
Located by the island's capital, Nuuk, it is the longest fjord on the Labrador Sea coast of Greenland, and one of the longest in the inhabited part of the country.
The Eastern Settlement (Old Norse: Eystribygð [ˈœystreˌbyɣð]) was the first and by far the larger of the two main areas of Norse Greenland, settled c. AD 985 – c. AD 1000 by Norsemen from Iceland. At its peak, it contained approximately 4,000 inhabitants. The last written record from the Eastern Settlement is of a wedding in Hvalsey in 1408, placing it about 50–100 years later than the end of the more northerly Western Settlement.
Despite its name, the Eastern Settlement was more south than east of its companion and, like the Western Settlement, was located on the southwestern tip of Greenland at the head of long fjords such as Tunulliarfik Fjord or Eiriksfjord, Igaliku or Einarsfjord, and Sermilik Fjord. Approximately 500 groups of ruins of Norse farms are found in the area, with 16 church ruins, including Brattahlíð, Dyrnæs, Garðar, Hvalsey and Herjolfsnes. The Vatnahverfi district to the southeast of Einarsfjord had some of the best pastoral land in the colony, and boasted 10% of all the known farm sites in the Eastern Settlement.
Siorapaluk (West Greenlandic) or Hiurapaluk (Polar Inuit) is a settlement in the Qaanaaq area of the Avannaata municipality in northern Greenland. The settlement is located in the northern shore of the Siorapaluup Kangerlua (Robertson Fjord). It has a population of 43 who speak the Inuktun language of the Polar Inuit as well as the Kalaallisut dialect of Greenlandic. Many of the inhabitants are direct descendants of the last migration of Inuit from Canada in the 20th century.
Siorapaluk is the northernmost inhabited public settlement in Greenland, and one of the northernmost such settlements in the world, surpassed only by a few villages in Svalbard. It is also the world's northernmost place inhabited by natives.