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Nuuk was founded in 1728 by the Danish-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede, who came looking for Norse descendants and found Inuit communities instead. He stayed, built a mission, and gave the city its Danish name, Godthab, meaning Good Hope. In 1979, when Greenland gained home rule and the Greenlandic language reasserted itself in public life, the city became Nuuk again, the Inuit name that had always been used by the people who lived there. It is a small reversal that carries a great deal of history.

Nuuk is by most measures the most indigenous city in the world: roughly 90 percent of Greenland's population is Inuit, and the city's institutions, including its Katuaq Cultural Centre designed by Jorn Utzon's colleagues in the Danish architectural tradition, and its Greenland National Museum with its extraordinary collection of 15th-century mummies found at Qilakitsoq, take indigenous culture as a given rather than an exhibit.

The Sermitsiaq mountain, 1,210 metres high, stands across the fjord and is visible from most of the city, dominating the skyline with a confidence that most mountain backdrops would envy.