12 cities — start with the ones we'd send you to first.
Oslo
01
Oslo
A capital that spent its oil wealth on architecture instead of monuments — the Nasjonalmuseet, the Munch museum on the waterfront, and Mathallen's stalls of cured reindeer and skrei all within walking distance of each ot
Bergen
02
Bergen
Seven mountains, one UNESCO-listed wharf of tilting Hanseatic warehouses, and a fish market where vendors have been arguing about the price of king crab since the 14th century.
Tromsø
03
Tromsø
The world's northernmost city of any size sits on an island at 69°N, where the aurora borealis ignites over a cathedral made of angular white concrete and the sun doesn't rise for two months.
Trondheim
04
Trondheim
Norway's medieval capital holds Nidarosdomen, the northernmost Gothic cathedral on earth, built over the grave of a king who was killed by his own people and then declared a saint.
Stavanger
05
Stavanger
An oil-boom city whose old quarter — 173 white wooden houses from the 1800s, still inhabited — survived industrialization intact, and whose Preikestolen cliff draws hikers who want to stand on a horizontal slab above a 6
Ålesund
06
Ålesund
Burned to the ground in 1904, rebuilt in four years in pure Art Nouveau by architects who had trained in Germany — the only city in Norway with a coherent architectural identity that isn't medieval.
Flåm
07
Flåm
A village of 350 people at the end of the Aurlandsfjord that exists almost entirely as the terminus of the Flåmsbana, a railway that drops 863 metres in 20 kilometres through waterfalls and tunnels blasted by hand.
Longyearbyen
08
Longyearbyen
The world's northernmost settlement with a supermarket and a university sits at 78°N on Svalbard, where it is illegal to die (the permafrost won't decompose you) and polar bears outnumber people.
Kristiansand
09
Kristiansand
Southern Norway's summer capital is where Oslo families drive their boats on midsummer weekends, but its real texture is the Posebyen quarter — a grid of 17th-century wooden houses that somehow survived every fire that t