Lofoten

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. Up close the wall breaks into peaks of ancient gneiss that drop straight into fjords, sheltered bays, beaches and narrow sounds, all of it lying between the 68th and 69th parallels, well inside the Arctic Circle. The highest summit, Higravstinden on Austvågøya, reaches only 1,161 m, yet because the mountains start at the waterline they read as alpine. The warm Norwegian Current keeps winters remarkably mild for the latitude, and the light swings to extremes: at Svolvær the sun stays above the horizon from late May to mid-July and does not rise at all from early December into January.

For more than a thousand years these waters have hosted one of the great cod fisheries of Europe. Each winter the fish come down from the Barents Sea to spawn here, and the trade in dried cod once ran south through Bergen under the Hanseatic League. The fishing villages are the human face of the landscape. Reine, on Moskenesøya, has been a trading post since 1743; its red cabins on a promontory beneath sheer peaks are the view most often printed from the archipelago, usually taken from Reinebringen, 448 m above the village. Nusfjord, on the southern shore of Flakstadøya, is a tight harbour hemmed in by rock, and Henningsvær on Austvågøya is the islands' main base for rock climbing.

History runs deep. At Borg on Vestvågøya, archaeologists in 1983 uncovered the foundations of a Viking Age chieftain's house 83 m long, the largest building of the period found in Norway, now reconstructed as the Lofotr Viking Museum. At the southern tip, between the Lofoten Point and the islet of Mosken, tides and currents create Moskstraumen, a system of eddies in open sea that Olaus Magnus drew on his Carta Marina in 1539 and that Edgar Allan Poe turned into "A Descent into the Maelström" in 1841 — the origin of the English word maelstrom.

Getting there

The main islands are linked to each other by bridges and undersea tunnels on the E10, which reaches the mainland via the Lofast road. Svolvær Airport, Helle (SVJ) lies about 10 km from the heart of the eastern islands, and Leknes Airport (LKN) serves the central ones; Harstad/Narvik Airport, Evenes (EVE) has direct flights to Oslo. Bodø, about 120 km away across the Vestfjorden, is the usual hub: a car ferry runs from Bodø to Moskenes, Værøy and Røst, and a fast boat to Svolvær. Hurtigruten calls at Stamsund and Svolvær. There is no railway in Lofoten; the nearest stations are at Bodø and Narvik.