Its main village is Baltasound, formerly the second-largest herring fishing port after Lerwick and now the location of a leisure centre and the island's airport.

Other settlements include Uyeasound, home to Greenwell's Booth (a Hanseatic warehouse) and Muness Castle (built in 1598 and sacked by pirates in 1627); and Haroldswick, location of a boat museum and a heritage centre.

[10] The Shetland Amenity Trust's "Viking Unst" project excavated and displayed part of the island's Norse heritage.

[13][14][15] Late Norse longhouses have been identified around both bays; the house at Sandwick still retains its cow-shaped byre door.

He was at the house of Olave Sinclair, the receiver or sheriff of Shetland on Unst, in July 1567 when his enemies arrived in three ships, and he fought a sea battle for three hours before sailing to Norway.

[19] Robert Louis Stevenson's father and uncle were the main design engineers for the lighthouse on Muckle Flugga, just off Hermaness on the north-west of the island.

In the 1950s, a Canadian sociologist, Erving Goffman, undertook a year of ethnographic research on Unst for his doctoral thesis, which underpinned his best known publication, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) and the dramaturgy approach he developed.

In 2013, Saxa Vord had self-catering holiday houses, a 26-bedroom bunkhouse, restaurant and bar, leisure facilities and a guided walks/evening talks programme.

[38] Three local businesses relocated their premises to the Saxa Vord site: Unst Cycle Hire, Valhalla Brewery[39] and Foord's Chocolates, Shetland's only chocolatier.

[41] In 2017, Frank Strang established the Shetland Space Centre Ltd and proposed that Lamba Ness would make a suitable launch site for rockets taking satellites into polar orbits.

[43] Despite its name, the location of "SaxaVord Spaceport" is near the easternmost point of Unst, several kilometers removed from Saxa Vord hill.

In January 2021, plans were submitted for three rocket launch pads[44] and the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced on 17 December 2023 that SaxaVord had been granted a spaceport licence "to host up to 30 launches a year", making it "the first fully licensed vertical spaceport in Western Europe.