Látrabjarg

The puffin watches you from less than a metre away, tilting its painted head as if deciding whether you're worth the trouble. Látrabjarg in Iceland's Westfjords is Europe's westernmost point — a 14-kilometre wall of vertical cliff swarming with millions of seabirds above an ocean that stretches unbroken to Greenland.

Látrabjarg rises 441 metres from the North Atlantic, making it one of Europe's tallest sea cliffs. The cliff face hosts one of the continent's largest seabird colonies: puffins, razorbills, guillemots, and northern gannets nest in their millions along the ledges each summer between May and August. The puffins here are famously unafraid of humans, allowing observation at arm's length — a rarity for a species that is typically skittish. The cliffs are also the site of one of Iceland's most celebrated rescue stories: in 1947, local farmers rappelled down the sheer face in a storm to save the crew of the British trawler Dhoon. The drive to Látrabjarg crosses some of the Westfjords' most remote gravel roads, passing abandoned farms and empty beaches.