🇳🇴 Norway · Western fjords
Bergen is one of those cities you fall for the moment you set foot on its wharf. Squeezed between seven mountains and the sea, with its colorful wooden houses climbing the slopes and the unmistakable outline of Bryggen reflected in the harbor water, it has the air of a large village and, at the same time, the energy of a university and port city. It is Norway's second city and, for many travelers, its prettiest: the 'gateway to the fjords'.
Its history is written in wood and water. For centuries Bergen was one of the most important ports in northern Europe, home to a thriving trade run by the Hanseatic League, the network of German merchants that controlled the dried cod business. From that era Bryggen survives, the old Hanseatic wharf of tightly packed wooden houses, today a UNESCO World Heritage Site: walking its alleys of leaning timber is traveling several centuries back.
But Bergen is not only its past. It is the fish market where you can try salmon and crab, the funicular that climbs Mount Fløyen for a view of the city from above, the museums devoted to Edvard Grieg — the great Norwegian composer, born here — and, above all, the launching point for the most spectacular fjords on the planet. This guide covers the essentials of Bergen in a practical, friendly way: what to see in the city, how to organize the fjord excursions, how to get around and how to enjoy it even in the rain, which here is almost part of the scenery.
Bergen was founded around 1070 by King Olav Kyrre, according to the tradition recorded in the sagas, and soon became one of the most important cities in Norway; for a time, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was even the capital of the kingdom. Its prosperity was built on the trade in 'tørrfisk' (dried cod) brought from the Arctic north and exported all over Europe. In the middle of the fourteenth century, the merchants of the Hanseatic League — the powerful German trading network — established one of their main offices (a 'Kontor') in Bergen, which controlled trade from the Bryggen wharf for centuries. Those German traders lived in the wharf's characteristic wooden houses, in an almost closed community. Bergen was the largest city in Norway until well into the nineteenth century. It suffered numerous devastating fires — an endemic plague of wooden cities — which forced Bryggen to be rebuilt again and again on the same medieval foundations. In 1979, Bryggen was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as an exceptional testimony to that Hanseatic era. The city was the birthplace of great figures of Norwegian culture, such as the composer Edvard Grieg and the violinist Ole Bull. During the Second World War it was occupied by Nazi Germany and suffered, among other tragedies, the explosion of a munitions ship in the harbor in 1944. Today Bergen is a prosperous port, university and tourist city, the capital of the fjords. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the Norwegian fjords: Bergen, the old capital and Hanseatic League port with its Bryggen wharves; the great World Heritage fjords of Geiranger and the Nærøyfjord; the Flåm Railway; cod and the farms hanging from the slopes; and Ålesund, reborn in Art Nouveau after the fire of 1904.
Read the history of Western fjords →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Tradition, as recorded in the Norse sagas, credits the founding of Bergen to King Olav Kyrre ('the Peaceful') around the year 1070. The site was no accident: a deep, sheltered bay (Vågen), open to the North Sea but protected by mountains and archipelagos, offered an ideal natural harbor on Norway's Atlantic coast. In an age when the sea was the great highway, Bergen was perfectly placed to become a center of trade and power.
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Bergen grew into the most important city in Norway and, at times, its de facto capital: a royal residence, the site of coronations and the center of the kingdom's political life. Some of its jewels date from that medieval period, such as Bergenhus fortress, with King Håkon's great banqueting hall (Håkonshallen), built around the middle of the thirteenth century, and the stone church of St Mary (Mariakirken), the oldest in the city.
The basis of Bergen's prosperity was, from very early on, a humble but immensely valuable product: dried cod from the north ('tørrfisk', or stockfish). Caught and air-dried in the Lofoten Islands and other parts of the Arctic north, that cod was brought to Bergen, which became the great collection and re-export port for dried fish bound for the rest of Europe. That trade would be the key to the city's history for centuries to come.
The most decisive chapter in Bergen's history came with the Hanseatic League, the powerful network of German cities and merchants that dominated northern European trade between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Hanseatics established one of their four great 'Kontor' (overseas trading offices) in Bergen, settling on the Bryggen wharf. From there they controlled, for some four centuries, the lucrative dried cod trade: they bought fish from Norwegian fishermen in the north and exported it across Europe in exchange for grain, salt and other goods.
The German merchants of Bryggen lived in an almost closed and heavily regulated community, in the wharf's characteristic wooden houses, arranged in long rows running back from the harbor. They were single men, subject to strict rules, who slept in small unheated rooms (for fear of fire) and worked in the warehouses where the fish was stored. That arrangement left a unique urban imprint: the labyrinth of wooden passages, courtyards and galleries you can still walk through today.
The Hanseatics' power in Bergen was enormous, and often a source of tension with the Norwegian population and authorities. Over time, as the Hanseatic League declined, control of trade passed into Norwegian hands: the German Kontor was transformed and, finally, disappeared as such in the eighteenth century. But the architecture of Bryggen, faithfully rebuilt after each fire, remained standing as a witness to that era.
Bergen, like almost every Nordic city of the period, was built mostly in wood, which made it terribly vulnerable to fire. Over the course of its history the city — and Bryggen wharf especially — suffered numerous devastating fires that razed it again and again. Some of the most famous occurred in the Middle Ages and in the centuries that followed, and the last major fire to hit Bryggen came in 1955, destroying part of the complex.
What is remarkable is that, after each fire, the houses of Bryggen were rebuilt respecting the medieval layout, the dimensions and the traditional techniques, raised on the same stone and timber foundations. That is why, although the buildings you see today are not the original medieval ones but later reconstructions (many from the eighteenth century onward), the ensemble faithfully preserves the urban structure of the Middle Ages. Beneath the ground at Bryggen, archaeological excavations have found layer upon layer of the successive burned and rebuilt cities, one on top of another, telling the city's story. Many of those finds are displayed in the Bryggens Museum.
That combination of structural authenticity and historical continuity is exactly what makes Bryggen a unique case, and what led UNESCO to inscribe it on the World Heritage list in 1979: not as an intact old building, but as the living testimony of an urban and commercial tradition that survived the centuries in spite of fire.
In 1979, the Hanseatic wharf of Bryggen was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list (site no. 59), one of the first Norwegian properties to receive that distinction. The recognition was based on Bryggen's outstanding universal value as testimony to the organization and architecture of a trading settlement of the Hanseatic era, which has kept its structure through almost a thousand years of continuous urban history on the same spot.
What UNESCO protects is not only the picturesque row of colored facades facing the harbor — Bergen's most famous postcard — but the complete ensemble: the long wooden buildings arranged in rows, the narrow passages between them, the courtyards, the galleries and the rear warehouses, together with the archaeological subsoil that holds the memory of the successive rebuildings. Bryggen is an outstanding example of a type of northern European merchant town that has all but disappeared elsewhere.
Inscription brought with it careful conservation and restoration work, necessary because wooden houses, besides the risk of fire, suffer subsidence and rot in their foundations on damp ground reclaimed from the sea. Keeping Bryggen standing is a permanent challenge. Today its houses hold artisans' workshops, shops, museums and restaurants, so the old wharf is still alive and in use, faithful to its commercial calling of centuries ago but turned into one of Norway's great tourist attractions.
Beyond trade, Bergen has historically been one of Norway's great cultural capitals. The city was the birthplace of some of the most important figures in Norwegian art, starting with the composer Edvard Grieg (1843-1907), the country's most celebrated classical musician, author of the 'Peer Gynt Suite' and his famous 'Piano Concerto', whose summer house, Troldhaugen, on the edge of the city, is today a museum and concert hall. It was also the birthplace of the legendary violinist Ole Bull, a figure of European musical romanticism, and it is linked to the playwright Henrik Ibsen, who directed the city's theater for years. That tradition lives on in the Bergen International Festival (Festspillene), one of the great cultural events in Scandinavia.
The twentieth century also brought darker pages. During the Second World War, Bergen was occupied by Nazi Germany (1940-1945). In April 1944, one of the city's greatest tragedies occurred when a Dutch ship loaded with explosives, the Voorbode, blew up in the harbor, causing many deaths and enormous damage in the Bergenhus and Bryggen area. The postwar years and Norway's oil prosperity, from the 1970s onward, transformed the city.
Today Bergen is a prosperous port, university and tourist city, home to important companies linked to oil, fishing and shipping, and the great capital of the fjords. Every year it welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors who use it as a base for exploring the Sognefjord, the Hardangerfjord and the Nærøyfjord. The old Hanseatic city of dried cod has become one of the best-loved gateways in all of Norway.