If you only know the Faroe Islands from travel headlines, you might picture the Eysturoy tunnel as an attraction: the world’s first undersea roundabout, a glowing art installation 189 metres below the Atlantic, a place where visitors drive through twice just for the thrill and the photos.
For people who actually live here, the tunnel is something quieter and more serious: a commute, a lifeline, a way to get home in the dark after a late shift without waiting for a ferry or scanning the weather every hour.
Since the 1960s, the Faroes have been stitched together by an expanding tunnel network. By 2018 there were already around 20 road tunnels totalling 44 kilometres, including two subsea toll tunnels; with the Eysturoy and Sandoy tunnels now open, the figure has passed 50 kilometres of underground road. The Eysturoyartunnil alone has quickly become a core route. Planners initially expected daily traffic in the range of around 5,000 vehicles under normal circumstances; between late 2024 and late 2025 the tunnel has in fact carried an average of about 6,386 vehicles per day, up from roughly 3,500–4,500 in its first months.
Tunnels have turned difficult crossings and storm-sensitive routes into daily corridors. A farmer who once depended on the ferry schedule can now drive to Tórshavn in bad weather. A teenager on one island can go to school or football practice on another without it being an expedition. The tunnels have “knit together islands that were once separated by geography and weather,” as one travel writer put it.
If you look at them this way, the tunnels are not just engineering projects. They are part of the social infrastructure of a small, scattered society that has long lived in what researchers call a “culture of migration”—a place where people’s lives stretch across borders, ferries, and flights, and where staying, leaving and returning are all normal parts of one biography.
For newcomers, too, the tunnels are one of the first things that shape how life actually works here.
Undersea corridors
On a map, the Faroe Islands are 18 steep fragments in the North Atlantic. In daily life, they increasingly function as a single, if elongated, town: people commute across islands, deliver goods by car rather than boat, and think of journeys in minutes instead of whether the ferry will run. Around 54,000 people live here; the tunnel network quietly decides how they can be spread out and still stay connected.
From an infrastructural point of view, this is about efficiency and resilience. From a human point of view, it is about what is realistically possible: which job you can accept, which school you can attend, which relationships you can maintain.
For a migrant nurse working shifts in the hospital, a student splitting life between a village and campus, or a foreign worker in construction, these undersea corridors quietly redraw the map of opportunity. They decide whether “staying on the islands” means being locked into one valley or moving freely through several islands on the same day.
The debate about future fixed links, such as the proposed Suðuroy tunnel – an investment estimated at several billion DKK, roughly a quarter of Faroese gross national income—shows how much is at stake. These projects are not only about concrete and rock; they are about whether small communities remain reachable in the long run.
Etiquette of light and stone
Tunnels also come with their own micro-rituals. Visitors are often dazzled by the big gestures—the roundabout art, the dramatic sloping drives, the long single-tube stretches under the sea. Locals have learned something else as well: a very practical etiquette of light, distance and patience.
On older, narrow tunnels and single-lane stretches, this etiquette is literally about who waits and who goes. Headlights and indicators become a language; small gestures of thanks—a raised hand, a brief flash of the hazard lights—say “I saw your patience and I appreciate it.” The rule is not written on any tourist brochure, but it is widely understood: you do not race, you do not force your way in, and you think about the other car’s options.
In a place where around 54,000 people share roads, shops and ferries, this is more than just driving style. The stranger who pulls aside for you in a tunnel might be the same person who stands behind you in the supermarket or sits near you at a football match. Courtesy is not abstract; it is a practical way of living in a small, interdependent community.
This is not unique to the Faroes, of course. Many rural places with single-track roads and passing bays know the same dance. But here, the stakes are higher. A careless driver in a tunnel is not just rude; they can be genuinely dangerous in bad weather, low visibility and confined space.
For newcomers, learning this etiquette is not an optional extra. It is part of becoming a safe neighbour.
Strain on a quiet system
Over the last years, the Faroes have drawn more international attention. Travel magazines list the islands among “best places to go,” and the idea of “coolcations” or even “stormcations”—trading heatwaves for wild weather—has become a selling point.
The numbers reflect this. In 2023, more than 130,000 foreign tourists visited the islands, outnumbering the roughly 54,000 locals. In 2024, official figures recorded around 95,000 check-ins at hotels, hostels and guesthouses—a record for the Faroe Islands. For a small territory, this is a significant increase in traffic, expectations and pressure.
The same undersea tunnels that hold the society together have naturally become part of the tourist experience. International outlets rave about “driving through a Viking artwork under the sea” or taking a “self-navigating road trip” that trusts a GPS to send you to quiet, beautiful corners across seven connected islands.
There is nothing wrong with any of this in principle. Tourism brings income and recognition to a small place whose economy is still heavily tied to fishing and a few other sectors. But every extra rental car also enters a system that was built first of all for local life.
In practical terms, increased traffic in tunnels means more drivers who do not know the local etiquette, more hesitation at the wrong moment, more last-second decisions when a lorry appears around a bend – and more moral stress for Faroese drivers who feel responsible for avoiding accidents without wanting to be traffic police. The asphalt and concrete can handle the load for now, but wear, maintenance needs and future capacity debates—including whether to build new tunnels or adjust tolls—are all shaped by this mix of local and visitor traffic.
For some regulars, what was once an easygoing daily routine through familiar tunnels now sometimes feels like navigating a constant stream of new arrivals, testing the limits of collective patience.
Newcomers
Migrants and foreign workers find themselves caught between these two worlds. On paper, they are not tourists; they have jobs, contracts, perhaps families. In the tunnel, especially at first, they often feel like visitors: uncertain which speed is considered polite, when to pull into a bay, how aggressively to brake when a truck appears around a corner.
At the same time, they are also future neighbours. They are the ones who will use these tunnels through winter, in the dark, on days when storms cancel ferries and narrow roads feel even narrower. They will be driving to work when there are no camera crews and no glossy drone footage, just rain and rock.
The Faroes already have a “culture of migration” in another sense: many Faroese themselves live transnationally for parts of their lives, moving between the islands and Denmark or other countries for study and work, then returning. Practically every family has someone who has been the newcomer elsewhere. If that experience is consciously remembered, it can help soften the tunnel learning curve for new arrivals here—not as charity, but as recognition of a shared vulnerability in other people’s systems.
Practical steps
So what does all of this mean in practice?
This is not an argument for turning the tunnels into themed attractions or filling them with slogans. Their strength lies precisely in their seriousness: they are working infrastructure, not amusement rides.
But a few simple measures could make them easier for newcomers to read, without diluting their character:
• Clearer, multilingual etiquette panels at key tunnel entrances. Not just speed limits and length, but two or three pictogram-based “how we do this” rules: who waits where, how to use passing bays, why you should not stop for photos.
• A short, optional “tunnel briefing” bundled with car rentals. Rental companies already explain tolls and apps. A one-page visual briefing on tunnel etiquette, perhaps co-designed with local drivers and the police, could go into every glove box.
• Stories that emphasise everyday life, not just spectacle. Tourism campaigns and international media love the undersea roundabout and the storm. Local outlets can complement that with profiles of people whose lives depend on the tunnels in less dramatic ways: a healthcare worker, a teacher, a teenager from a small island, a lorry driver.
For migrants and foreign workers, seeing themselves in those stories can be an early sign that they are not just temporary guests on someone else’s road system.
None of this changes the basic reality: driving in the Faroes requires attention, humility and patience, especially in winter. The tunnels do not erase distance or weather; they only carve safe lines through it.
Metaphor for belonging
In the end, undersea tunnels are literal structures: concrete, rock, lights, numbers on a map. It would be easy to over-romanticise them.
Yet it is hard not to hear the metaphor. A small society decided that scattered islands were not enough; it wanted to be more tightly connected. It invested in difficult, expensive projects—often controversial at first—to make that possible.
Today, people drive to work and school under the ocean. Visitors follow, amazed by the art and the engineering. Migrants learn, turn by turn, how fast to go, when to wait, how to share the road.
Belonging, in such a place, is not just about having an address or a residence permit. It is about slowly learning the grammar of light, stone and patience under the sea—until, one day, you find yourself flashing your headlights in thanks without thinking about it, and realise that somewhere along the way, the tunnels have become part of your own map of home.