In 2016, a woman used sheep to map the Faroe Islands after Google left the islands off of Google Street View.
In mid-2026, some people on social media celebrated a story from the Faroe Islands, a self-governing archipelago north of Scotland.
Apparently, 2026 marked the 10-year anniversary of the time a Faroese woman allegedly strapped cameras on sheep to map the country when Google wouldn’t, according to a post on X (archived). The opening of the post read:
Google would not send a Street View car to the Faroe Islands, so in 2016 a Faroese woman strapped a camera to a sheep and mapped the country herself.
The grievance was legitimate. Eighteen islands in the North Atlantic, some of the most spectacular road in Europe, causeways and tunnels and single track cut along the edge of a cliff face, and none of it on Street View. Google had been up Mont Blanc. Google had been to Greenland. Google had been above the Arctic Circle in half a dozen countries. The Faroes had about fifty thousand people and a coastline, and they were simply not on the list.
Durita Dahl Andreassen worked for the tourist board in Tórshavn. Her reasoning was straightforward and, in its way, unanswerable. There are more sheep on the islands than people. They walk freely. They go everywhere. They have no schedule and no other commitments.
So a fellow islander built a harness. Onto it went a 360 degree camera, a mobile phone and a lightweight solar panel to keep the batteries up, the whole rig weighing under a kilo. The camera was set to fire every minute. Five sheep in five locations were fitted out and released to do what they were going to do anyway, which was walk about eating grass on the edge of some of the most photogenic drops in the North Atlantic.
The images came back tagged with GPS coordinates, over a mobile signal, from a sheep. Andreassen uploaded them to Google Maps.
They called it Sheep View 360. Her job title, for a period, was Sheep View 360 Project Manager, which remains one of the finest lines ever printed on a business card.
The one technical hitch, reported by the tourist board with total sincerity, was motivation. The sheep had to be encouraged to go to the interesting bits, which meant somebody standing behind them doing the thing you do to move sheep. The technology worked perfectly. The talent needed direction.
The claim also spread on social media websites such as Facebook (archived) and Instagram (archived).
The claim is true. Visit Faroe Islands (archived), the island territory’s official tourism board, celebrated the 10-year anniversary of its “Sheep View 360” campaign on July 12, 2016.
Leading the campaign for Visit Faroe Islands was Durita Andreassen, who explained the project in a video on the Visit Faroe Islands Sheep View 360 webpage. The day Visit Faroe Islands launched the campaign, it released a video showing the sheep walking around with the cameras on their backs.
A map from the campaign shows Andreassen’s sheep captured images of the Hosvik area. There are three spots near Hosvik on Google Street View in which the Sheep View 360 can still be seen today.
The campaign worked. On Aug. 11, 2016, Google announced it had started working with the Faroe Islands to bring Google Street View coverage to the area.
Just over a year later, Visit Faroe Islands proudly announced that the territory now had Google Street View coverage.
For further reading, Snopes has previously fact-checked claims about sheep, including a miscaptioned photo that incorrectly asserted sheep went through a fence gate that wasn’t there.
