The 10 Best Travel Experiences in Norway

The Lofoten archipelago in northern Norway rises dramatically from the Norwegian Sea as a series of jagged peaks and sheltered bays.

Traditional red fishing cabins called rorbuer dot the shoreline against a backdrop of some of Europe's most spectacular mountain scenery, with the Northern Lights frequently visible in winter.

Geirangerfjord is a narrow arm of the sea in western Norway, walled in by near-vertical cliffs over a kilometre high and threaded with waterfalls such as the Seven Sisters.

A UNESCO World Heritage fjord, it can be seen by sightseeing boat, from a hairpin mountain road, or on foot along old farm paths.

Cruise ships call through the short summer season, but the scale of the cliffs and water still dominates.

Trolltunga, meaning Troll's Tongue, is a spectacular horizontal rock formation that juts 700 metres above Lake Ringedalsvatnet in western Norway.

The 27-kilometre return hike to reach it passes through some of Norway's most dramatic fjord landscape, ascending over 1,000 metres in elevation.

A cruise through Norway's steepest fjords, where waterfalls drop hundreds of metres past cliffside farms into water so still it mirrors the mountains.

Geirangerfjord and Naeroyfjord, both UNESCO-listed, narrow to barely a ship's width in places.

Small villages like Flam and Geiranger appear suddenly at the fjord's end, framed by snow long into summer.

Midnight sun in June extends the scenery well past a normal evening.

A flat granite plateau juts out 604 metres above the Lysefjord, ending in a sheer drop with the fjord stretching away beyond it.

The hike climbs around 350 metres over four kilometres, steep and rocky in places but manageable for most reasonably fit walkers in a few hours.

Nothing about the scale of the drop registers properly until you are standing at the edge of it.

Svalbard is a remote Norwegian archipelago deep in the Arctic Ocean, roughly 60% covered by glaciers and home to more polar bears than people.

Longyearbyen, the main settlement, is the base for dog-sledding, snowmobiling and boat trips past calving glaciers and drifting sea ice, with the midnight sun in summer and polar night and northern lights in winter.

Almost everything beyond town requires an armed guide, which shapes the whole experience.

One of the steepest standard-gauge railways in the world, the Flam Railway climbs 866 metres in just 20km between the fjord-side village of Flam and the mountain station at Myrdal, passing waterfalls and hairpin turns carved through solid rock over 20 years of construction.

It makes a scheduled stop at Kjosfossen waterfall, where passengers step out onto a platform beside the falls.

Bryggen is the old Hanseatic wharf on Bergen's harbour, a row of narrow, brightly painted wooden warehouses rebuilt after fires since the 14th century and listed by UNESCO since 1979.

The buildings now hold workshops, galleries and restaurants behind their tilted timber frames, and the wharf sits at the centre of a lively harbour city ringed by seven mountains.

Compact enough to explore in an hour, longer with the Hanseatic Museum.

The Atlantic Road links a scatter of skerries and islets off Norway's west coast on an 8km run of bridges and causeways, built to look like it dives straight into the sea.

The Storseisundet Bridge is the famous shot, but the whole stretch is a slow, low-lying drive between open ocean on both sides, with fishing hamlets and pull-offs for scrambling over the rocks.

Storms send waves over the road, which locals treat as a spectator sport in autumn.

North Cape is a 307-metre cliff on the northern tip of Magerøya island, marketed for two centuries as the northernmost point of mainland Europe - a technicality it doesn't quite hold, but the setting is real.

A visitor centre and a globe monument sit on the plateau above the Barents Sea, with the midnight sun visible from mid-May to late July.

The long, treeless drive across open Arctic tundra is as much a part of it as the cape itself.