🇳🇴 Norway · Oslo and the south
Stavanger has two souls that coexist quite naturally. On one hand, it is a modern, prosperous city, Norway's 'oil capital', with good restaurants, museums and a cosmopolitan feel. On the other, it keeps one of the prettiest old wooden quarters in northern Europe, a maze of cobbled lanes and little white houses that look like they belong to another era. And, above all, it is surrounded by some of the most spectacular landscapes in the country.
Because if anything has put Stavanger on the traveler's map, it is its nature. A few kilometers away opens the Lysefjord, a fjord of dark water boxed in by vertical walls, and above it juts Preikestolen, 'the Pulpit Rock': an almost perfectly flat rock platform hanging 604 meters above the water, one of the most photographed natural viewpoints on the planet. Walking to its edge and looking over the drop is one of the great experiences in Norway.
This guide covers the essentials of Stavanger in a practical, friendly way: how to organize the hike to Preikestolen, what the trail is like and what to bring, what to see in the city, how to get around and what other wonders the Lysefjord hides, from the vertiginous Kjeragbolten to cruises among waterfalls. A perfect base for combining urban culture with outdoor adventure in southwestern Norway.
Stavanger is an old city: its origin as an urban center is linked to the building of its cathedral, the Stavanger domkirke, consecrated around 1125, at the time a bishop's seat was established there. In the Middle Ages it was an important religious and commercial center in southwestern Norway. The loss of the bishopric after the Protestant Reformation (sixteenth century) sent it into decline for a while, but from the nineteenth century the city boomed thanks to fishing and, especially, the fish canning industry: the sardine and herring canneries turned Stavanger into a prosperous industrial and exporting center, and left a deep mark on its identity (still remembered at the Canning Museum). The great leap, however, came in the late 1960s, when the discovery of enormous oil and gas fields in the North Sea transformed Norway, and Stavanger became the center of that new industry: the Norwegian 'oil capital', home to major energy companies. That boom brought wealth, growth and an international population. Today Stavanger combines that fishing and industrial past with its energy role and with flourishing nature tourism, drawn by the Lysefjord, Preikestolen and Kjerag. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The capital region and the southern coast: Oslo, the old Christiania where the Constitution of 1814, Ibsen's theater and Munch's art were born; the fjord with its Viking ships; Stavanger and North Sea oil; and the luminous Sørlandet coastline.
Read the history of Oslo and the south →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The birth of Stavanger as a city is intimately tied to its cathedral. Although the area was inhabited from prehistoric times — remains going back to the Stone and Iron Ages have been found nearby — the urban center proper grew up around the building of the Stavanger domkirke, the cathedral consecrated around 1125 and dedicated to St Swithun (Svithun). For that reason, the year 1125 has traditionally been taken as the city's founding date, and so it celebrated its nine hundredth anniversary.
In those early days of Norwegian Christianity, the creation of a bishop's seat in Stavanger was an event of enormous importance. The bishop and his cathedral turned the small coastal settlement into a religious and administrative center for the southwest of the country. Bishop Reinald, of English origin, is credited with a prominent role in founding the see and in driving the building of the church. The cathedral, still standing, is today one of the best-preserved medieval cathedrals in Norway and the city's oldest monument.
The name 'Stavanger' has Old Norse roots and its etymology is debated. It is usually linked to the words 'stafr' (referring to a geographical feature, perhaps a mountain or rock shaped like a staff) and 'angr' (fjord or inlet), so the place name would refer to the bay on which the city sits. That relationship with the sea and the fjords would accompany Stavanger throughout its history.
During the Middle Ages, Stavanger was one of the most important centers in southwestern Norway. The presence of the bishop and the cathedral drew clergy, pilgrims, craftspeople and merchants, and the city worked as a meeting point between the agricultural interior of Rogaland and the sea routes running along the coast. Urban life was organized around the cathedral and the bishop's palace, in a web of wooden houses descending toward the harbor.
The diocese of Stavanger covered a wide territory in the southwest of the country, which gave the city considerable political and ecclesiastical weight. The bishops were powerful figures, and the cathedral — rebuilt and enlarged in Gothic style after a fire in the thirteenth century — became a symbol of that prestige. The economy depended on fishing, the farming of the surrounding area and a modest but steady trade along the coast.
Like the rest of Norway, Stavanger lived through the great crises of the late Middle Ages, especially the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, which decimated the country's population and hit the towns hard. Even so, Stavanger kept its status as a bishop's seat and its role as the religious head of the region until the profound changes the Protestant Reformation would bring in the sixteenth century.
The sixteenth century marked a turning point for Stavanger. The Protestant Reformation, which came to Norway through the Danish crown around 1537, transformed the country's religious life: the property of the Catholic Church passed to the state and the power of the bishops was drastically reduced. For a city whose importance rested largely on its status as a bishop's seat, the change was a hard blow.
The decline deepened in 1682, when the bishop's seat was moved to Kristiansand, the new city founded by the Danish king Christian IV in the south of the country. Deprived of its role as ecclesiastical head, Stavanger lost much of its administrative relevance and entered a period of stagnation. For a time, even its formal status as a city came into question.
The local economy, however, still depended on the sea. Fishing — particularly for herring, whose shoals appeared and disappeared off the coast in cycles — supported the population in the good years and plunged it into hardship in the bad ones. Stavanger survived as a modest port, waiting for the great changes the nineteenth century would bring with industry.
The nineteenth century brought prosperity back to Stavanger, this time through fish. The abundant herring catches of the early decades of the century drove trade and population growth, and the city filled with merchants, shipowners and sea workers. But the great engine of transformation was the canning industry.
Through the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Stavanger became Norway's capital of fish canning, especially of small sardines smoked and tinned in oil (the famous 'brisling', or Norwegian sardines). Dozens of factories set up in the city and employed thousands of people, many of them women and children, in hard shifts. Stavanger's sardine tins, with their colorful labels, were exported all over the world and became a local hallmark.
That industrial era left a deep mark on the city's appearance and culture: the harbor warehouses, the rows of wooden houses in the working-class districts and a collective memory preserved today, among other places, at the Norsk hermetikkmuseum (Canning Museum), housed in a former factory. When the canning industry went into decline in the middle of the twentieth century, Stavanger seemed headed back into uncertainty. But beneath the waters of the North Sea a wealth awaited that would change its destiny forever.
The event that completely transformed Stavanger came in the late 1960s. In 1969 the enormous Ekofisk oil field was discovered in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea, a find that would change the economic history of all Norway. The exploitation of oil and gas, begun in the 1970s, would turn a fishing country of relatively modest means into one of the wealthiest nations in the world.
Stavanger, thanks to its strategic position on the southwest coast, was chosen as the base for the new industry. The headquarters of the state company (the future Equinor, formerly Statoil) and of numerous national and international energy companies were set up there, along with the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate. The city filled with engineers, technicians and workers from all over the world, and saw rapid growth in its population, its economy and its international character. That is how Norway's 'oil capital' was born.
That boom brought wealth and modernity, but also the challenge of preserving the city's historic identity. Stavanger managed to keep its old wooden quarter (Gamle Stavanger), one of the best preserved in northern Europe, while developing new districts and infrastructure. The Norsk Oljemuseum (Norwegian Petroleum Museum), opened in 1999 on the harbor, tells the story of this era that defines contemporary Stavanger.
Contemporary Stavanger is a prosperous, cosmopolitan and diverse city, where the fishing and industrial legacy, a powerful energy industry and flourishing tourism coexist. With its metropolitan area alongside Sandnes, it forms one of the most dynamic regions in Norway, with a notably international population thanks to the decades of the oil boom.
The city has managed to reinvent itself culturally. In 2008 it was European Capital of Culture, a recognition that boosted its arts scene, its festivals — such as the Gladmat food festival and the jazz festival — and its commitment to street art, with the well-known Nuart festival that has filled its walls with murals. The old quarter of Gamle Stavanger, with its little white wooden houses, and the city's museums draw visitors from all over the world.
But if anything has put Stavanger on the global traveler's map, it is the nature around it. The Lysefjord region, with Preikestolen ('the Pulpit Rock') jutting out 604 meters above the water and the vertiginous Kjeragbolten wedged between two walls, has become one of the world's great hiking destinations. Aware of the value of the energy transition, Stavanger is also looking toward a greener future, while combining its past, its industrial present and its spectacular nature into a unique identity.