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Narsarsuaq
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Narsarsuaq (variously spelled, the name is Greenlandic for Great Plain) was the principal city of Greenland in the times of Erik the Red whose farm Brattahlíð was nearby. That settlement died out by the end of the Middle Ages.
In 1941, the United States built an air base at Narsarsuaq called Bluie West One, and an important link in the North Atlantic Ferry Route. Thousands of planes used BW1 as a stepping stone on their way from the aircraft factories in North America to the battlegrounds of Europe. After the end of the war, BW1 continued to be developed, until it was rendered surplus by the advent of mid-air refueling and by the construction of a larger facility far to the north at Thule Air Base. In 1951, it was agreed that Denmark and the U.S. would jointly oversee the airbase; in 1958, the U.S. abandoned it, but it was reopened in 1959 by the Danish government after the loss of the vessel Hans Hedtoft with all souls south of Cape Farewell. It now serves airliners from Iceland and Denmark, as well as commuter flights from other Greenlandic communities operated by Air Greenland. Small planes crossing the Atlantic sometimes replicate the North Atlantic Ferry Route, stopping at Narssarssuaq Airport and other WWII airfields, including Goose Bay, Newfoundland in Canada and Reykjavík in Iceland.
Today there is a thriving tourism industry in and around Narsarsuaq, whose attractions include a great diversity of wildlife, gemstones, glaciers, and a replica of the first Christian church on the American continent. There is a legend that the former military hospital at Narsarsuaq was used to house maimed Korean War veterans, whose next of kin believed them dead. First appearing in a 1990 travel book, this story gained traction in a 1994 play by the Danish writer Sven Holm, in the 2001 novel No One Thinks of Greenland by John Griesemer, and in the 2005 film Guy X, starring Jason Biggs as a hapless GI who is ordered to Hawaii but stumbles into the "secret Arctic base" instead.