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Spectacular fjords, the northern lights, the midnight sun and wild country: Norway is Nordic epic in its purest form.
Norway is a long, thin country: if you flipped it over on the map of Europe, its northern tip would reach the Sahara. That geography explains almost everything. The coast is broken by fjords that cut hundreds of kilometers inland, with rock walls a thousand meters high falling into the water, and the north crosses the Arctic Circle, with two months of sun that never hides in summer and another two of permanent night in winter.
It is a destination of nature rather than cities, and it is worth accepting that when you plan. Oslo and Bergen are pleasant and have good museums, but nobody travels to Norway for them: you travel for the fjords, for Lofoten, for the northern lights and for hikes such as Trolltunga or Preikestolen, where you end up standing on a ledge of stone six hundred meters up. Journeys are long, distances are deceptive and the weather is in charge.
It has to be said plainly: Norway is one of the most expensive countries in the world, and for most travelers' budgets the hit is hard. The flip side is that it has an unusual legal figure, the right of free access to nature, which allows you to camp for free almost anywhere, and a public transport network that reaches incredible places. With those two things a trip can be done for considerably less than you might assume. Norway also has a working holiday agreement with Argentina, with three hundred places a year.
The local currency is the Norwegian krone (NOK). It is worth carrying some cash, telling your bank before you travel and checking the day's exchange rate.
Full converter for NOK →Oslo (OSL) is the main gateway, with the Flytoget and regular trains into the center in about twenty minutes; Bergen (BGO) and Tromsø (TOS) serve the fjords and the north. The Oslo–Bergen train, around seven hours, is one of the most spectacular rail journeys in the world, and the Flåm branch line that drops down to the fjord leaves from it. On the coast, the Hurtigruten is the mail boat that runs up to Kirkenes and works both as transport and as a voyage. In the fjords, the ferries are not an excursion but part of the road: they are built into the routes and paid for like a toll. Bear in mind that transport takes a large slice of the budget and that booking in advance is the only way to bring it down.
Summer, from June to August, is the season for the fjords and the hikes: it is when the mountain roads open, all the ferries and cable cars run, and the great hikes such as Trolltunga are passable without special gear. It is also when you get the midnight sun, which north of the Arctic Circle means twenty-four-hour daylight between late May and late July. The flip side is that it is the most expensive and the busiest season, especially in Geiranger and Lofoten, where accommodation has to be booked many months ahead.
Winter is a completely different trip, and no worse. Between late September and March you can see the northern lights, with Tromsø and Lofoten as the best bases, and there is dog sledding, snowmobiling and whales. You have to accept the darkness: in Tromsø the sun simply does not rise between late November and mid-January. Many mountain roads close, several ferries reduce their frequency and the great hikes are off the table. May and September are the shoulder windows, with fewer people and slightly better prices, though with part of the mountain infrastructure still closed or already closing.
The produce is extraordinary and that is where the focus lies: salmon, cod, king crab from the north, scallops. Dried cod and clipfish were for centuries the export that kept the country going, and skrei, the winter cod from Lofoten, is a seasonal product restaurants announce as an event. On the street people eat the pølse, a sausage wrapped in potato bread or in lompe, and in the north reindeer and elk appear, served in stews or as cold cuts. For dessert, waffles with sour cream and berry jam, eaten at any hour.
Two practical things change the budget a great deal. First: alcohol is heavily taxed and sold only in the state Vinmonopolet shops, which close early and do not open on Sundays; in bars, a beer costs what a meal costs in another country. Second: supermarkets are the salvation, and with them you can cook or put together picnic lunches without giving up quality. Many places to stay include a generous buffet breakfast that lets you skip lunch. And the tap water is among the best in the world, so buying bottled water makes no sense.
Norway is one of the safest countries on the planet and crime is practically not an issue for travelers, not even at night in Oslo. The real risk is nature, and it should not be underestimated. The weather changes in minutes: you can set out in sunshine and run into fog, wind and five degrees less halfway up a mountain. Every year there are rescues of poorly equipped tourists on Trolltunga and Preikestolen. Before any hike, check the forecast, bring layers, rain gear, food and a flashlight even in summer, and tell someone where you are going.
The health system is excellent and extremely expensive without cover, so travel insurance is essential; for a Schengen visa you are required to have one with minimum cover of thirty thousand euros, and it is worth checking that it includes mountain rescue, which many policies exclude. Tap water is drinkable throughout the country. No vaccinations are required. In the north and in Svalbard there are two specific warnings: outside the settlements in Svalbard you must travel with an armed guide because of the polar bears, and in winter, anywhere in the north, cold plus wind can be dangerous without the right clothing. Emergencies: 113 medical, 112 police, 110 fire.
Norway is among the most expensive countries in the world and there is no point pretending otherwise. As a rough guide, with no official source because none exists for these items, a dorm bed usually runs from forty to seventy euros, a mid-range hotel from a hundred and forty to two hundred and twenty, a main course in a restaurant between thirty and forty-five euros and a beer between ten and thirteen. On top of that come the fjord ferries, which are part of the road network and are paid like a toll, plus the cable cars and the scenic trains.
There are three levers that genuinely change the arithmetic. The first is the allemannsretten, the right of free access to nature: you can camp for free on uncultivated land, more than a hundred and fifty meters from a house and for up to two nights in the same spot, which makes a trip with a tent viable. The second is cooking: supermarkets are expensive by European standards but very cheap compared with Norwegian restaurants. The third is booking in advance: Vy trains have minipris fares far below the standard one, and domestic flights with Norwegian and Widerøe bought early cost less than the train. Public transport is excellent and reaches almost every fjord, so renting a car does not always pay off.
Norwegians are reserved with strangers and that can read as coldness, but it is not: it is respect for other people's space. You don't make conversation with whoever is sitting next to you on the bus, and people leave physical distance in queues. The flip side is that they are direct, they do what they say and they trust: there are fruit stands by the roadside with a little box for leaving the money. There is also the law of Jante, a very present cultural idea that discourages standing out or showing off; ostentation goes down badly, and that is one reason why such a rich country does not look it.
The bond with nature is not a tourist pose but the center of social life: people go walking or skiing every weekend, in any weather, and that is where the saying comes from that there is no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing. That access is guaranteed by law through the allemannsretten, which allows walking and camping on uncultivated private land, in exchange for leaving no trace: no fires outside permitted areas, take your rubbish with you and do not disturb the animals. Two other useful things: hardly anyone uses cash and everything is paid by card or phone, even at a village stall; and shoes come off when you enter a house, without exception.
The history of Norway is the history of a people shaped by ice, by the sea and by an extreme geography: a long, narrow country hanging off the northwestern edge of Europe, where the glaciers of the last ice age carved the most spectacular fjords on the planet and where, long before Norway existed, the Sami were already following the reindeer across the northern tundra. From those coasts, at the end of the eighth century, the Vikings set out: navigators, traders, settlers and raiders who in their open boats reached Iceland, Greenland and even the shores of America five centuries before Columbus, and whose name was burned into the memory of half of Europe on the day in 793 when they sacked the monastery of Lindisfarne.
On that foundation a country was built, century by century: the unification under Harald Fairhair, the Christianization sealed with the blood of St Olav at Stiklestad, Nidaros Cathedral and its pilgrims, the Black Death that carried off half the population, the four centuries of Danish rule that the Romantics called "the 400-year night", the Eidsvoll constitution of 1814 and the forced union with Sweden, and at last independence in 1905. The twentieth century brought the polar explorers who planted the flag at the South Pole, the German occupation and Quisling's betrayal, the Resistance and the heavy water sabotage, the burning of Finnmark, the long and painful policy of "Norwegianization" against the Sami and its belated reparation, and North Sea oil, which turned a poor country of fishermen and farmers into one of the richest in the world. Traveling Norway — from the Hanseatic wharves of Bergen to the Lofoten Islands, from Trondheim Cathedral to the North Cape — is moving through that layered history of ice, sea and perseverance.
Read the full history of Norway →Pick a region and open each destination to see what to do, prices and how to get there.
These are the sources we cite most across this country's guides, with how many times each appears. Hard data —tickets, opening hours, requirements, transport— comes from the official source and carries the date we checked it. Restaurant and hotel picks come from guides and reviews, and we say so on each page.
