Lysefjord

Interesting facts

At Flørli, a wooden staircase of 4,444 steps climbs about 740 metres beside an old hydropower pipeline, billed as the longest wooden stairway in the world.

The Flørli power station opened in 1916 with a 740-metre drop; its equipment first had to be carried up the mountain on foot and by horse.

Kjerag became one of the world's best-known BASE jumping sites after the first registered jump in 1994, and tens of thousands of jumps have been logged since.

Preikestolen was the setting for the cliff-top climax of the 2018 film Mission: Impossible – Fallout.

The Lysefjord Bridge at the mouth of the fjord is a suspension bridge opened in 1997, with a main span of 446 metres.

Beneath the surface the fjord is a chain of basins divided by underwater rock sills, the shallowest only about 10 metres down.

The cliffs are mostly granite and gneiss, and in places the walls actually overhang the water.

A colony of several hundred harbour seals lives in the fjord, where the species is protected.

Copper ore was found at Lastabotn on the fjord in the 1700s, and quarries at Eiane supplied paving stone and kerbs.

The two hydropower plants at Lysebotn together have a capacity of over 300 megawatts, enough for more than 100,000 people.

Why it is worth it

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. Glaciers carved the trough during the ice ages and the sea flooded it when they retreated. At its mouth near Forsand the water is only about 13 metres deep, but inland beneath Preikestolen it plunges to more than 400 metres, so the fjord is almost as deep as its walls are high.

Two famous viewpoints hang over it. Preikestolen, the Pulpit Rock, is a flat-topped cliff standing about 604 metres above the water; it can be seen from a boat but is far more dramatic from above, after a hike. Near the head of the fjord rises Kjerag, about 1,110 metres, with even greater drops and the Kjeragbolten, a boulder wedged in a crack high above the void. BASE jumping from the cliffs is legal here.

People are scarce. There are no roads along the shores, which are simply too steep, and only a few farms and hamlets reached by boat. Forsand and Oanes sit at the western end, where the Lysefjord Bridge is the only crossing. At the eastern end lies Lysebotn, a village largely of hydropower workers: the Lyse and Tjodan plants are built inside the mountain, with water falling 620 and 896 metres to their turbines. The only road into Lysebotn climbs almost 900 metres in 27 hairpins, one of them inside a tunnel.

Victor Hugo, who came in 1866, gave the fjord a menacing role in Toilers of the Sea, imagining it as a black street of water no ship dared enter. The reality in fair weather is the opposite: sightseeing boats from Stavanger run its full length, and from the water the walls, waterfalls and the tiny figures on Preikestolen give a sense of scale no photograph manages.

Getting there

The fjord begins some 25 km east of Stavanger; the point used here is about 36 km from the city. Stavanger Airport, Sola (SVG) is about 44 km away. Sightseeing boats from Stavanger sail the length of the fjord; Preikestolen and Kjerag are reached on foot from their trailheads, and Lysebotn by the hairpin road or by boat.

Lysefjord

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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