Travelling in Norway: a coast that carries the whole country

Why the sea does the work here

Norway has around 95,120 kilometres of road and 664 kilometres of motorway, and the gap between those two figures is the practical story of the country. A national route here includes its ferry crossings as ordinary links: the boat is part of the numbered road, it is paid for like a bridge, and a crossing that goes every half hour in July may go every second hour in November. Mountain passes shut in winter storms and some shut for the season. The map a driver studies in Oslo is not the map in force in February.

Rail covers 4,114 kilometres and reaches most of the larger towns south of Bodø. North of Bodø there is no railway at all. That gap is why flying inside Norway is ordinary rather than extravagant: of 146 airports, 52 are public and 43 are run by the state operator Avinor, which puts a runway within reach of towns of a few thousand people.

Where the road does hold together it does so by engineering. The highway system carries its traffic over the water on bridges and under the rock in tunnels, and long tunnels are ordinary rather than remarkable on the western fjords, where the alternative is a detour of a hundred kilometres around the head of an inlet. It is worth reading a route by its crossings rather than by its length.

The coastal ship is the third system and the oldest. Hurtigruten works the whole coast between Bergen and Kirkenes, calling at the towns on the way as a service that carries freight and residents as much as visitors, and in summer the same water fills with cruise ships, Bergen being the main cruise port. A visitor who treats the boat as scenery misses what it actually is, which is the line that holds the north of the country to the south.

How far apart the two ends are

The mainland runs from 57 to 71 degrees north, and Svalbard carries the kingdom to 81. Distance on the ground is worse than distance on the map, because the road bends around every fjord that the sea cut inland, and the sea cut deep: Sognefjord alone reaches 204 kilometres from the coast, the longest fjord in the world and the second deepest. Two weeks spent driving from the south coast to Finnmark buys a lot of windscreen and not much else, which is why most itineraries pick one stretch of coast and fly or sail to it.

Arrival by land is easier than the shape of the country suggests. Norway shares 1,619 kilometres of border with Sweden, 727 with Finland and 196 with Russia, and the Swedish frontier is crossed by road and rail without a check, Norway having joined the Schengen Area in 1999 despite staying outside the European Union. The Russian crossing in the far northeast is an external border and a different matter altogether.

Administratively the country was redrawn again on 1 January 2024 into 15 counties and 357 municipalities, and the largest municipality is 1,500 times the size of the smallest. Sizes on a Norwegian map mean less than they look.

What the fjord country is made of

The western fjords are what the ice left. A sheet of it covered nearly the whole country in the last glacial period, ground the valleys deep, and the sea came in behind the melt. Geirangerfjord is the one usually called the finest of them and the Nærøyfjord is the narrowest of the famous ones, both of them inscribed on the World Heritage list. Behind them sit the glaciers that are not remnants of the ice sheet at all but recent growths of their own: Jostedalsbreen, Folgefonna, Hardangerjøkulen.

Height arrives quickly. The average elevation of the mainland is 460 metres and about a third of it lies above the tree line, which on the west coast falls to roughly 500 metres and rises to 1,100 metres at the head of Sognefjord. A walk that starts at a quay can be on open alpine ground in a morning. Jotunheimen holds the high summits, including Galdhøpiggen at 2,469 metres, and Hardangervidda is the plateau that makes the crossing between east and west feel like weather rather than scenery. The two most photographed ledges in the country, Preikestolen and Trolltunga, are both day walks from the Vestlandet fjords rather than climbs.

The crowding is as concentrated as the terrain. Geiranger and Flåm sit at the ends of fjords that cruise ships can enter, so a small village takes a ship's worth of day visitors in a morning and is empty again by evening. The traffic follows a small number of named places, and an arm of the same fjord system an hour away can be quiet on the same afternoon in July.

When the light is worth planning for

More than half of all tourists come to Norway between May and August, and that concentration is about light rather than warmth. From late May to late July the sun does not set at all north of the Arctic Circle, and the rest of the country gets up to twenty hours of daylight. From late November to late January the sun does not rise in the north, and the southern days are short and blue. The aurora needs that darkness, so the two things most people associate with Norway cannot be had on the same trip.

Rain is the other half of the calculation, and it does not follow the season a visitor expects. Precipitation on the coast is heaviest in late autumn and winter, and the driest months are April to June. Late spring on the western fjords is therefore drier than high summer, with snow still on the ridges and the waterfalls at full melt, before the cruise season is at its peak.

Warmth lags the light. Inland areas reach their warmest around the middle of July and the coast in the first half of August, and the calmest, warmest days are found in the inland valleys and at the heads of the long fjords rather than on the open shore.

Why the weather changes within an hour

Norway is among the wettest countries in Europe and also holds some of the driest inhabited land on the continent, and the two can be an hour apart. Mountains wring the Atlantic dry as it crosses, so the western slopes take the rain and the valleys behind them take almost none. Saltdal in Nordland records 211 millimetres a year on the 1991 to 2020 normal, which makes it the driest place in the country; Skjåk in the south gets 295 millimetres, and parts of Finnmark get under 450 millimetres. Bergen, on the wrong side of the same mountains, is famous for the opposite.

Temperature behaves as strangely. Southern Lofoten and Bø sit north of the Arctic Circle with every winter month averaging above freezing, and Bø is the most northerly place in the world where that is true. Tromsø once recorded 430 hours of sun in a single month. Palms of a hardy kind grow outdoors as far north as Sunnmøre. None of this makes the country warm, but it does mean that latitude is a poor guide to what a given valley will be doing on the day.

The hazards are the same geology working in the other direction. Windstorms of hurricane strength are not unusual on the coast and in the mountains, avalanches come off steep slopes in the north, and rock falling into a fjord has made waves that killed people at Loen in 1905 and 1936 and at Tafjord in 1934.

What the far north is for

North of the Arctic Circle the country stops being a milder version of itself and becomes something else. Lofoten, Vesterålen and Senja are islands where the mountains meet the sea without a coastal plain in between. Beyond them the Finnmarksvidda plateau sits almost exactly at the tree line, and the last patch of mountain birch gives out about ten kilometres south of the North Cape plateau, after which the ground is tundra at sea level.

This is also the part of Norway that belongs to somebody in particular. The Sámi are recognised as one of two peoples of Norway, and the Sámi Parliament in Karasjok, opened on 9 October 1989, is elected by and among them, with 39 representatives from seven constituencies. Its plenary meetings are open to the public and the building is worth the detour on its own: the debating chamber is a timber version of a lavvo, the tent used on the reindeer migrations.

Svalbard is a further step and should be planned as one. The archipelago is glaciated over more than 90% of its eastern part, holds Austfonna, the largest glacier in Europe, and has an Arctic tundra climate rather than the subarctic one of the mainland. It is the only part of the kingdom where an Arctic expedition is a literal description rather than a marketing phrase.

What Norway built rather than carved

Norwegian building history has few palaces and no great castles, because the population was small, the climate was hard and the money went into ships. What survives instead is wooden, and three of those buildings carry World Heritage listings.

Bryggen in Bergen is the last of the four overseas Hanseatic offices anywhere. The league set up in Bergen in 1350 and traded stockfish from northern Norway under royal privilege; the quarter burned repeatedly and was rebuilt each time on the same plot lines, so the 62 buildings standing today take their present form from after the fire of 1702. Urnes stave church stands on a promontory of the Sognefjord and is the oldest of the twenty-eight left. Of roughly 1,300 medieval stave churches once indexed, 28 survive in Norway, and the carved animals on the north wall of Urnes gave a name to the Urnes style found across Scandinavia. Borgund, Hopperstad and Heddal are the large ones for anyone collecting them.

Røros is the third and the least expected. A copper town founded in 1646 on the cold mountain plateau, built entirely of wood, it worked its ore until the company went bankrupt in 1977 and it kept the shape that mining gave it. The listing covers the Circumference, the district of privileges granted with the copper works, including a winter transport route across frozen lakes and rivers that was usable from November to May. Add Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, the Art Nouveau centre of Ålesund rebuilt after its fire at the start of the twentieth century, and the Norsk Folkemuseum at Bygdøy in Oslo, and the built list is close to complete.

Why walking is the cheapest thing here

Norway is expensive in exactly one way: anything with labour in it. Restaurants, ferries with a crew and guided anything are priced by a high-wage economy, while the landscape itself is free and the law says so. The right of access, allemannsretten, lets anyone walk, ski, paddle and pitch a tent on uncultivated land regardless of who owns it, keeping a set distance from houses and moving on after a couple of nights. The Norwegian Trekking Association maintains the hut network that makes long routes practical, some staffed and some self-service on a key system, and mountain touring is a mass domestic habit rather than a specialist sport.

The state has also built for the driver. Eighteen National Tourist Routes are designated stretches of ordinary road where the viewpoints, rest stops and footbridges were commissioned from architects, which turns the drive itself into the attraction on roads that were going to be spectacular anyway. Norway also has the largest stock of plug-in electric cars per head in the world, so a rented electric car is a normal thing to drive here and the charging network was built for residents rather than for tourists.

The currency is the krone rather than the euro, which surprises visitors arriving from a euro country by land, and cards are accepted almost everywhere including on the ferries and in the huts.

What the country asks in return is planning. The ferry runs when it runs, the pass is open or it is closed, the hut is where the map says and the next one is a day away, and the weather that decides all of it can be different at both ends of the same fjord.