The Most Beautiful Places in Norway
38 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Norway are Geirangerfjord, Reine, Lofoten and Borgund Stave Church. The list covers 38 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Norway's coast was shaped by ice. During successive ice ages, glaciers flowing off the mountains ground river valleys far below sea level; when the ice melted, the sea filled them, leaving fjords walled by cliffs over a thousand metres high, with waterfalls pouring from hanging valleys on either side. The same hard rock gives the country its famous ledges and overlooks, and its long coast has carried a building tradition from medieval cathedrals to some of the boldest modern architecture in Europe.
Geirangerfjord and Nærøyfjord, both on the UNESCO list of West Norwegian fjords, are the classic examples: narrow, steep and deep. Across from the old farms of Geiranger, the Seven Sisters fall in parallel streams down the rock wall, and the road up Dalsnibba climbs to a viewpoint high above the fjord. Lysefjord has Preikestolen, a flat-topped cliff about 600 metres above the water, while Trolltunga is a thin tongue of rock jutting out high over the lake Ringedalsvatnet. Vøringsfossen plunges into the Måbødalen valley at the edge of the Hardangervidda plateau.
The built places are just as distinct. Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, raised over the grave of Saint Olav, is the northernmost medieval cathedral and long a goal of pilgrims. The Arctic Cathedral in Tromsø, from 1965, rises in stacked white triangles. In Oslo, the Opera House slopes into the harbour with a white roof people can walk across, and Vigeland Park gathers hundreds of granite and bronze figures by a single sculptor, Gustav Vigeland, around his towering Monolith.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Geirangerfjord | Fjord | ✓ |
| 2 | Reine, Lofoten | Most beautiful village | |
| 3 | Borgund Stave Church | Church building | |
| 4 | Preikestolen | Cliff | |
| 5 | Trollstigen | Mountain pass | |
| 6 | Bryggen | Pedestrian street | |
| 7 | Segla | Mountain | |
| 8 | Oslo Opera House | Opera house | |
| 9 | Vigeland Sculpture Park | Sculpture garden | |
| 10 | Trolltunga | Rock formation | |
| 11 | Seven Sisters (Geirangerfjord) | Waterfall | |
| 12 | Nærøyfjord | Fjord | ✓ |
| 13 | Arctic Cathedral | Church building | |
| 14 | Lofoten | Island | |
| 15 | Nidaros Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 16 | Dalsnibba | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 17 | Vøringsfossen | Waterfall | |
| 18 | Lysefjord | Fjord | |
| 19 | Trollfjord | Fjord | |
| 20 | Rock carvings at Alta | Petroglyph | ✓ |
| 21 | Lærdal Tunnel | Tunnel | |
| 22 | Troll Wall | Cliff | |
| 23 | Flåm Line | Heritage railway | |
| 24 | Pyramiden | Ghost town | |
| 25 | Vemork | Hydroelectric power station | |
| 26 | Saltstraumen | Fjord | |
| 27 | Frogner Park | Urban park | |
| 28 | Storseisundet Bridge | Bridge | |
| 29 | Torghatten | Natural arch | |
| 30 | Kjeragbolten | Mountain |
01 Geirangerfjord
Norway62.094° N 7.081° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ArvidO from Pixabay The Geirangerfjord is a narrow blade of water, about 15 km long, cut into the mountains of Sunnmøre in western Norway. It branches off the Sunnylvsfjorden, itself an arm of the long Storfjorden, and ends at the small village of Geiranger, where the Geirangelva river runs into it.
Did you know? Skageflå, perched about 250 metres above the water, was farmed from the Middle Ages until 1916 and was once among the richest goat farms around Geiranger.
02 Reine, Lofoten
Norway67.932° N 13.089° E
Image by Oberlehner from Pixabay Reine is a fishing village built on a scattering of low islets and a promontory at the mouth of the Reinefjord, on Moskenesøya near the southern tip of the Lofoten archipelago, well above the Arctic Circle.
Did you know? The village packs fewer than 300 people onto just 0.28 square kilometres, a density of over a thousand per square kilometre.
03 Borgund Stave Church
Norway61.047° N 7.812° E
Image by jmlagarde2jml from Pixabay Borgund Stave Church is the building most people picture when they think of Norwegian stave churches: roof above roof, spire above spire, with dragon heads rearing from the gables. It stands in the Lærdal valley in western Norway, dark with pine tar against green slopes, and it is also one of the least altered.
Did you know? The Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments bought the church in 1877, after a restoration earlier that decade by architect Christian Christie.
04 Preikestolen
Norway · 29.2 km from Stavanger58.987° N 6.187° E
Svein Magne Tunli · CC BY-SA 4.0 Preikestolen, the Pulpit Rock, is a block of granite with a nearly flat top about 25 by 25 metres that ends in a vertical drop of 604 metres to the Lysefjord.
Did you know? Summer visitor numbers roughly tripled in a decade, from about 78,000 in 2004 to around 250,000 in 2014.
05 Trollstigen
Norway62.457° N 7.673° E
Image by plutozoom from Pixabay Trollstigen, the "Troll's Ladder", is the stretch of County Road 63 that climbs out of the Isterdalen valley above Åndalsnes in western Norway.
Did you know? When it opened in 1936 the road was only three to four metres wide; today it measures roughly four to six metres.
06 Bryggen
Norway · 0.7 km from Bergen60.398° N 5.323° E
Image by Michelle-Maria from Pixabay A row of steep-gabled wooden houses, painted ochre, red and white, lines the eastern side of Bergen's harbour, and behind the façades narrow passages run back between leaning timber walls, galleries and stairs.
Did you know? The Hanseatic community here was an all-male world: women were barred from the wharf and the merchants' employees were forbidden to marry.
07 Segla
Norway · 33.9 km from Finnsnes69.507° N 17.595° E
Ximonic (Simo Räsänen) · CC BY-SA 4.0 Segla is the mountain that has come to stand for the island of Senja in northern Norway: a single blade of rock rising 639 metres straight out of the sea on the island's outer, northern coast.
Did you know? For all its dramatic walls, Segla has never been popular with rock climbers, because much of its rock is poor and loose.
08 Oslo Opera House
Norway · 1.3 km from Oslo59.907° N 10.754° E
Jorge Franganillo · CC BY 4.0 The Oslo Opera House rises out of the fjord like a sloping white iceberg, and its roof is a public square.
Did you know? The marble comes from the La Facciata quarry at Carrara, chosen because it keeps its brightness even when wet.
09 Vigeland Sculpture Park
Norway · 2.9 km from Oslo59.928° N 10.699° E
Image by office8 from Pixabay Frogner Park in Oslo is the city's largest green space, an old manor estate that the municipality bought in 1896 and opened to the public in stages from 1904. Its centre belongs to one man.
Did you know? The granite block for the Monolith was raised upright in 1928, a year after it arrived from the quarry.
10 Trolltunga
Norway60.133° N 6.754° E
Image by trondmyhre4 from Pixabay Trolltunga, "the troll's tongue", is a slab of ancient bedrock that juts horizontally from a mountainside in Ullensvang municipality in western Norway, about 1,100 m above sea level and some 700 m above the lake Ringedalsvatnet.
Did you know? The Mågelibanen funicular climbs 430 metres with a maximum gradient of about 42 degrees; it stopped carrying passengers around 2010.
11 Seven Sisters (Geirangerfjord)
Norway62.107° N 7.094° E
Image by ELG21 from Pixabay Halfway along the Geirangerfjord, on its northern wall, a group of separate streams slides side by side down a cliff of bare rock into the water: the Seven Sisters, known locally as Knivsflåfossen.
Did you know? When the flow drops in late summer, the water gathers into fewer channels and sometimes only four of the seven sisters can be seen.
12 Nærøyfjord
Norway60.944° N 6.931° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by jogi031 from Pixabay The Nærøyfjord is the narrowest and one of the most dramatic arms of Norway's Sognefjord system: about 17 km long, down to roughly 250 metres wide at its tightest point, and walled by mountains that rise to around 1,760 metres.
Did you know? Larger vessels must slow to 8 knots in the narrowest stretch of the fjord.
13 Arctic Cathedral
Norway · 1.5 km from Tromsø69.648° N 18.987° E
Jma · CC BY-SA 4.0 Seen from across the strait, the Arctic Cathedral rises above the Tromsdalen shore like a stack of white sails or slabs of ice leaning against one another, its sharp profile set against the mountains behind.
Did you know? Pipes in the original 1965 organ eventually buckled under their own weight; its 2005 replacement has 42 stops and 2,940 pipes.
14 Lofoten
Norway68.333° N 14.666° E
Lukas Beck · CC BY 4.0 Seen from the mainland around Bodø, Lofoten looks less like a chain of islands than a single serrated wall rising out of the Norwegian Sea — Norwegians even call it Lofotveggen, the Lofoten Wall.
Did you know? In August 1936 nine king penguins were released around Lofoten; they survived until at least 1944, and sightings were once mistaken for the extinct great auk.
15 Nidaros Cathedral
Norway · 1.5 km from Trondheim63.427° N 10.397° E
Image by Michelle-Maria from Pixabay Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim is the northernmost medieval cathedral in the world and the national shrine of Norway. It stands over the burial place of King Olav II Haraldsson, who fell at the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030 and was soon venerated as Saint Olav, the patron of Norway.
Did you know? The only surviving relic of Saint Olav is a thighbone in an arm-shaped silver reliquary, given by Queen Josephine to St Olav's Catholic Cathedral in Oslo.
16 Dalsnibba
Norway62.049° N 7.269° E
Image by IK3 from Pixabay Dalsnibba is a mountain at the head of the Geiranger valley in western Norway, and from its summit at around 1,500 metres the view drops all the way down to the Geirangerfjord — a narrow blue arm of the sea wound between near-vertical walls, with the village of Geiranger small at the water's edge.
Did you know? The Nibbevegen was built just 3.5 metres wide, with ten bends whose tightest radius is only 6 metres.
17 Vøringsfossen
Norway60.427° N 7.251° E
Image by rperucho from Pixabay Vøringsfossen is the waterfall with which Norway introduced itself to the world.
Did you know? The composer Edvard Grieg kept a log cabin in the area and came to see the falls many times.
18 Lysefjord
Norway · 39.3 km from Stavanger59.010° N 6.359° E
Image by oohajo from Pixabay The Lysefjord cuts 42 km into the mountains of Ryfylke, east of Stavanger, and it is narrow even by Norwegian standards: in places under two kilometres wide, with granite walls dropping almost sheer for a thousand metres. The name is usually explained as "light fjord", after the pale granite of its sides.
Did you know? Preikestolen was the setting for the cliff-top climax of the 2018 film Mission: Impossible – Fallout.
19 Trollfjord
Norway · 22.4 km from Svolvær68.364° N 14.977° E
Image by Ronile from Pixabay Trollfjorden is a narrow arm of the sea only about 2 km long, cutting into the island of Austvågøya from the Raftsundet strait, and it is one of the most dramatic places on the coast of northern Norway.
Did you know? After a scuffle the fishermen broke through the barrier, and in 1891 Parliament amended the Lofoten fishing law to ban seine nets there.
20 Rock carvings at Alta
Norway · 3 km from Alta69.947° N 23.188° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Andreas Haldorsen · CC BY-SA 4.0 When the first figures were spotted on the shore rocks of Alta in the autumn of 1973, nobody expected the scale of what followed.
Did you know? Archaeologist Jan Magne Gjerde's research in 2010 pushed the oldest phases of the carvings back by about a thousand years.
21 Lærdal Tunnel
Norway60.972° N 7.368° E
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 5 km of rock between Aurland and Lærdal in western Norway, carrying the E16 highway beneath the mountains that separate Oslo from Bergen.
Did you know? Despite its length the tunnel has no emergency exits: lifting an SOS phone or extinguisher triggers signs telling every driver to turn and exit.
22 Troll Wall
Norway62.482° N 7.729° E
Ximonic (Simo Räsänen) · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Troll Wall, Trollveggen in Norwegian, is the sheer north face of the Trolltindene massif in Romsdalen, in the county of Møre og Romsdal, and it is the tallest vertical rock face in Europe: about 1,100 m from the valley floor to its highest point. Near the top the summit ridge overhangs the base by roughly 50 m.
Did you know? The first winter ascent, in March 1974, took 13 days of climbing on the French Route.
23 Flåm Line
Norway60.863° N 7.115° E
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Flåm Line is a short railway with an outsized landscape. 5 percent. To manage that descent the builders threaded the line through 20 tunnels, and laid curves as tight as 130 m in radius.
Did you know? Freight trains started running on 1 August 1940, months before passenger service began during the German occupation.
24 Pyramiden
Norway78.656° N 16.325° E
Bjoertvedt · CC BY-SA 3.0 At the head of Billefjorden, an Arctic fjord in the heart of Spitsbergen, stands a complete Soviet town that was simply switched off in 1998: brick apartment blocks, a sports hall, a cultural palace, and the northernmost monument to Vladimir Lenin in the world.
Did you know? The town ran its own cowshed and greenhouses, where heat from the coal-fired power plant was used to grow cucumbers and tomatoes.
25 Vemork
Norway59.872° N 8.494° E
Image by Moellenborg from Pixabay Vemork sits on a ledge above a deep gorge outside Rjukan in Telemark, reached across a suspension bridge over the chasm.
Did you know? In February 1943 the saboteurs avoided the guarded bridge, climbing down into the gorge, crossing the icy river and entering the plant along a railway track.
26 Saltstraumen
Norway · 9.5 km from Bodø67.231° N 14.614° E
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Four times a day, the sea tries to squeeze through a gap 150 metres wide and three kilometres long near Bodø in northern Norway — and the result is one of the strongest tidal currents in the world. Saltstraumen is the narrow strait that links the outer Saltfjorden with the large Skjerstad Fjord behind it.
Did you know? Among finds near the strait is a small oval bone object identified as a bullroarer, considered the oldest musical instrument found in Norway.
27 Frogner Park
Norway · 2.8 km from Oslo59.927° N 10.701° E
Image by fuyounger0 from Pixabay Frogner Park in Oslo's West End is a 45-hectare city park with an old manor, a rose garden and sports grounds, but people come for one thing it contains: the Vigeland installation, 212 sculptures in bronze and granite made by Gustav Vigeland between 1924 and 1943 and set out along a single axis.
Did you know? Vigeland began modelling the Monolith in 1924, five years before the stonemasons started carving it.
28 Storseisundet Bridge
Norway · 31.2 km from Molde63.017° N 7.354° E
Image by Rob026 from Pixabay The Storseisundet Bridge lifts its deck high above a narrow sound, rising from low causeways laid across bare rocky skerries at the very edge of the ocean.
Did you know? More than ten car manufacturers have filmed commercials on the Atlantic Ocean Road, using its exposed sea crossings to stage rough weather.
29 Torghatten
Norway65.398° N 12.090° E
Image by drhorstdonat1 from Pixabay Torghatten is a granite mountain on the island of Torget off the coast of Helgeland in northern Norway, and right through its middle runs a natural tunnel big enough to hold a cathedral nave.
Did you know? The granite's layering stands almost vertical, creating natural lines of weakness that ice and water could exploit to open the passage.
30 Kjeragbolten
Norway59.034° N 6.593° E
Scoundrelgeo · CC BY-SA 4.0 The boulder wedged into Kjerag's cliff face has been sitting exactly where it is since roughly 50,000 BC, dropped and jammed into the crevice during the last Ice Age and never dislodged since — meaning it is older than agriculture, older than the melting of most of the ice that put it there in the first place, and it…
Did you know? Geologists explain its position by the land rising after the ice sheet melted faster than the sea, which locked the stone into the crevice.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Norway?
- On our list, Geirangerfjord ranks first, followed by Reine, Lofoten and Borgund Stave Church.
- How were Norway's fjords formed?
- Glaciers moving down existing river valleys during the ice ages carved them into deep U-shaped troughs, often far below sea level. When the ice retreated, the sea flooded in, leaving long narrow inlets with steep walls.
- How high is Preikestolen above the Lysefjord?
- The flat top of Preikestolen, or Pulpit Rock, stands about 604 metres above the waters of the Lysefjord.
- What are the Seven Sisters in Geirangerfjord?
- The Seven Sisters are seven separate streams of water falling side by side down the cliffs of the Geirangerfjord. On the opposite side of the fjord is a single waterfall known as the Suitor.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Norway?
- In our collection, the places in Norway are most often fjords (5), churches (4), cliffs (3) and mountains (2).
- How many places are on this list in Norway?
- The list covers 38 places.