Hvalsey Church is the most famous and best-preserved Viking ruin in Greenland.

Icelandic chronicles record that in the year 1408 a wedding took place in the parish church of Hvalsey, one of the most important districts of the Norse (ie. Scandinavian) colony in Greenland. The wedding was witnessed by the crew of an Icelandic trading ship. The banns were read three times, the service was conducted by two priests, and many of the Norse Greenlanders were present as witnesses and guests. Shortly afterwards, the Icelanders returned home in their ship.

This is the last record of the people of the Norse colony in Greenland. Possibly up to five hundred colonists were living there at the time of the wedding. These people all vanished. The crew of a German ship driven by storms from Iceland to the site of the colony in the 1540s wrote of abandoned farmsteads and silence. After five hundred years of Norse settlement, Greenland had been left to the sea, ice and eskimoes