Nærøyfjord

Interesting facts

For a fjord walled by peaks over 1,700 metres, the water is strikingly shallow: about 75 metres at most, and only around 11 metres at Bakka.

The shallow sill at Bakka was built up by a glacial end moraine and debris from rockfalls.

One theory traces the name to an old Norse form linked to Njord, the god of the sea, while others derive it from a word for narrow.

Larger vessels must slow to 8 knots in the narrowest stretch of the fjord.

The small wooden Bakka Church on the fjord shore was built in 1859.

Dyrdal, a hamlet on the fjord reachable only by boat, served as a seat of the local district court from 1737 until 1880.

An old postal route once ran along the fjord's steep shore between the farms of Styvi and Bleiklindi.

The fjord was protected as a landscape conservation area in 2002, three years before UNESCO listed it.

Around 20 mammal species and some 50 bird species have been recorded in the area, and seals have become regular visitors in recent decades.

Why it is worth it

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. South of the hamlet of Bakka the fjord narrows to less than 500 metres of water, while the summits on either side are only about three kilometres apart, so the cliffs seem to lean over the boats. It branches off the Aurlandsfjord in Aurland municipality and ends at the village of Gudvangen, where the Nærøydalselvi river comes down from its valley.

The landscape is a textbook of glaciation. Ice sheets during the Quaternary cut a deep, narrow trough into ancient crystalline bedrock, and when they melted the sea flooded in. Waterfalls pour from hanging valleys hundreds of metres up, especially after snowmelt, and bare rock faces show the polish of the ice. In 2005 UNESCO inscribed the Nærøyfjord together with the Geirangerfjord as the West Norwegian Fjords, one of the best examples of fjord landscape on Earth. The protected area also takes in an old farming landscape, worked for centuries on the few patches of usable ground between the cliffs.

The fjord is shallow at the narrows near Bakka and deeper further in, and in hard winters it has occasionally frozen, as in the 1920s and 1962, when scheduled boats had to feel their way along the ice edge. Summer is the busy season, with cruise ships, sightseeing boats, kayakers and hikers all sharing the water and trails. Paddling a kayak from Gudvangen is the quietest way to take it in, while the classic trip is the boat between Gudvangen and Flåm, which runs the full length of the Nærøyfjord and then out along the Aurlandsfjord.

That boat is often combined with the Flåm Railway and the Bergen line into a one-day loop from Bergen or Oslo, and the approach by road from Voss descends through the Stalheim hairpins, 13 bends in a short, steep stretch. The fjord is also one of the landscapes that inspired the look of Arendelle in Disney's Frozen.

Getting there

The main access points are Gudvangen at the head of the fjord and Flåm on the Aurlandsfjord. Sightseeing boats between them take about two hours and do not carry cars; by road, the E16 links the two villages in about 20 minutes, mostly through a long tunnel. Buses run between Voss, on the Bergen railway, and Gudvangen in about 50 minutes via Stalheim. Åsane, on the outskirts of Bergen, is about 100 km away by straight line. The nearest airport by distance, Ørsta-Volda (HOV), lies about 145 km away across the mountains; most visitors fly into Bergen (BGO) instead.

Nærøyfjord

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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