World Heritage Sites in Norway - Cultural Sites

Cultural Sites

• Bryggen, the old wharf of Bergen, is a reminder of the town's importance as part of the trading empire Hanseatic League from the 14th to the 16th century. Many fires, the last in 1955, have ravaged the beautiful wooden houses, although its main structure has been preserved.

• Urnes Stave Church, a stave church (stavkirke) in Luster municipality by the Sognefjorden. Stave churches were built from the 11th to the 13th century, and are a great example of traditional Scandinavian wooden architecture.

• Røros Mining Town, a mining town in southern Sør-Trøndelag county. The Røros Copper Mines were active from 1744 to 1977. The town was destroyed by Swedish troops in 1679. After this, Røros was rebuilt and has about 80 wooden houses which gives the town a medieval appearance due to the dark pitch-log facades.

• Rock carvings at Alta are petroglyphs at the shores of Altafjord, in Finnmark county, north of the Arctic Circle. Thousands of paintings and engravings into rocks gives us the impression of what it must have been like living in the Far North before 4200-500 B.C.

• Vegaøyan/The Vega Archipelago at Vega in Nordland county, just south of the Arctic Circle is the name of a dozen islands, where fishermen and farmers have been living since the Stone Age. There are fishing villages, quays, warehouses, eider houses (built for eider ducks to nest in), farming landscapes, lighthouses and beacons.

• Struve Geodetic Arc is a chain of survey triangulations stretching from Hammerfest in Norway to the Black Sea. These are points of a survey, carried out between 1816 and 1855 by the astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, and it represented the first accurate measuring of a long segment of a meridian arc.