We left the campground near the ferry this morning and drove west, out of Tórshavn and toward the island of Vágar. The sky was still low and grey, so we made a plan for the day around the weather. We would drive straight to the far end first, to the places that hold up even under cloud, and save the ones that need clear light for the afternoon, in the hope it would lift.

Getting to Vágar involves driving an under the sea tunnel. The road runs into the Vágatunnilin, the Vágar tunnel, which is a little under five kilometres long and passes beneath the strait between the two islands. It was the first of the undersea tunnels built here. You drive down, and down, with the sea somewhere above you, and then back up into daylight on the other side.

We went straight for the northwest corner, to the village of Gásadalur and its waterfall. The last stretch of road there runs through a second tunnel, the Gásadalstunnilin, and this one is a different animal. It is single-lane, cut narrow through the mountain, with pull-outs every so often where you wait for a car coming the other way. We drove ones like it in Iceland, so we knew the rhythm of it: watch ahead, judge the gap, tuck into a pull-out and let the other car by.

Gásadalur sits on a shelf of green above the sea, ringed by the highest mountains on the island. The waterfall is called Múlafossur, and it is the one you have seen even if you did not know its name. A stream runs off the plateau, reaches the cliff edge at the village, and drops straight off it into the ocean. The whole thing is in one view: the falling white water, the black cliff, the grass on top, the sea at the foot, and the village behind. Under grey sky it was still one of the finest things we have seen.

This waterfall is so well known that it has started turning up in the wrong places. On the map on our phone we found it pinned at spots that are nowhere near Gásadalur, the photograph copied onto other locations by people who had not been there. If you come, aim for Gásadalur itself and ignore the stray pins. The real one is worth getting right.

From there we drove back to the village of Bøur, where we had spotted a small flat area to park from the road. You park outside the village here, and walk in.

These villages are not open-air museums, though they look so pretty you might take them for one. They are people’s neighborhoods, lived in, and only residents drive into them. Visitors leave the car outside and go in on foot. It is a small courtesy, and it keeps the villages as homes rather than a stage.

Bøur is a cluster of maybe twenty or thirty small houses, most with grass growing on the roofs, set above the water and looking out to the jagged islet of Tindhólmur. There is a small church, and when we arrived it was being made ready for a wedding, with a waterfall running down the slope right beside it. Everything was neat and clean and in its place. It is hard not to use the word fairy-tale for a village like this, the grass roofs and the mountains and the sea, all of it in order. We had our lunch there, and by the time we finished the little parking area outside had filled with cars, the wedding guests arriving.

We left after lunch, and the weather had turned. The cloud lifted and the light came out, which was exactly what we had been waiting for, so we drove to the lake.

Sørvágsvatn is the largest lake in the Faroes. It is known for one trick of the land: it sits in a shallow bowl right at the top of a sea cliff, so it hangs high above the ocean. From the car park a trail runs along the shore and then climbs to the cliff edge at a high point called Trælanípa, which means the slave cliff. It is a couple of hours there and back, level at first and then rising, and the payoff is the view down the length of the lake with the sea far below it. We walked out and up, and from the top the illusion is complete: the water seems to sit high above the Atlantic, with only the thin lip of the cliff between them.

At the far end the lake actually spills over that lip as a waterfall, Bøsdalafossur, dropping about thirty metres straight into the Atlantic. A lake pouring off a cliff into the sea is not a thing you see often.

The views from up there were incredible in every direction. Out to sea stood Geituskorardrangur, a tall thin sea stack rising out of the water on its own, the kind of rock left behind when the softer cliff around it wears away. Along the coast the land was cut into fjords, the long steep-sided inlets where the sea reaches in between the mountains, one after another down the south shore. Back near the car park we could also see Klovningur, a low rock islet standing off the coast below.

Between them, this lake and the waterfall at Gásadalur are probably the two most photographed sights in the Faroes, the two you find on the covers and the posters. We saw both in one day, on one island.

Vágar also taught us something about how you drive this island. Many of the roads are dead ends. They run out to a village on a fjord or a headland and simply stop, so touring by car means driving to the end of each one and turning back the way you came. That is no hardship, because the small villages at the ends of those roads are a sight in themselves, set against the water and the peaks. They are worth the drive out as much as the named stops are.

Then we drove back east, off Vágar and onto Streymoy, and made camp for the night at Vikar. Tomorrow, if the weather holds, we will go and find some of the waterfalls nearby.