Four days in Bergen: it rains most days, and it is still the best looking city in Norway

Bryggen is a row of tall gabled wooden buildings standing gable end to the water on the eastern side of the bay, and it has been there in one form or another since the twelfth century. It has also burnt down repeatedly: what you see went up after the fire of 1702, on the same foundations and to broadly the same plan, and the alleyways running back from the front are where the interest is. Go into them. The overhanging galleries, the worn plank floors and the doors that no longer meet their frames are what six hundred years of settling into a medieval rubbish tip does to a building.

The important thing is that almost all of it is still in use. There are jewellers and knitwear shops and a restaurant that has been feeding people in the same room since 1708. Walk the front, then walk the back lanes, then walk the front again, and set aside an hour and a half.

In the evening take the funicular. Fløibanen climbs from a station a hundred metres behind the fish market to the plateau on Mount Fløyen in about seven minutes, and at the top there are marked paths into the forest, a lake twenty minutes further, goats employed to keep the scrub down, and the view straight back over the bay and the roofs. The queue at midday in July is long. At eight in the evening it is not, and the light is better.

The Hanseatic Museum occupies a merchant's house on the wharf from the early 1700s, and it is the only place where the interiors survive. What it shows is not comfortable. The German traders who ran Bergen kept apprentices from about the age of fourteen in a house without heating or open flame, because of the fire risk, sleeping two to a bunk in cupboards off the office. Round the corner at Schøtstuene are the assembly rooms, the only buildings on the wharf that were allowed a fire, where the men of each tenement ate, drank and held their own courts. One ticket covers both. Parts of the complex are periodically closed for restoration work, so check on the day.

St Mary's Church is a few hundred metres up the hill and is the oldest building in Bergen, put up around 1150. It is a Romanesque basilica with twin towers, later extended in Gothic, and it was the German community's parish church for four hundred years, which is why a plain Norwegian stone church contains a Baroque pulpit encrusted with allegorical figures and a late medieval altarpiece from Lübeck.

Finish at Bergenhus, the fortress on the point, which was the royal seat when Bergen was the capital of Norway. Håkon's Hall was built between 1247 and 1261 as the king's banqueting hall and is still used for state dinners; the roof is a reconstruction, because a Dutch ammunition ship blew up in the harbour in 1944 and took most of it off. The Rosenkrantz tower next to it started as a keep in the 1270s and was rebuilt into a residence in the 1560s by the governor whose name it carries. The grounds are a public park with a good view of the bay, and the rule about not drinking in them is enforced.

Edvard Grieg built a villa on a promontory south of the city in 1885 and lived there for the last twenty two years of his life. Troldhaugen is kept as it was when he died in 1907: the piano he wrote at, the small rooms, the composer's hut down on the rock at the water's edge where he actually worked, which is about the size of a garden shed and has a desk, a stove and a view. He and his wife Nina are buried in the cliff face on the estate. In summer there are recitals every day in a small concert hall dug into the hill, with the villa framed in the window behind the piano.

It is twenty five minutes on the light rail and a twenty minute walk from the stop, and it is the best half day out of the centre.

The stave church at Fantoft is two stops back up the line. Stave construction is the great Norwegian medieval building technique, upright staves rather than horizontal logs, and this one came from Fortun on the Sognefjord and was moved here in the 1880s. Then a black metal musician burnt it down in 1992 and it was rebuilt exactly. Whether a faithful copy is worth the ticket is a fair question; the setting in the pines is lovely and the answer is probably yes if you have not seen a real one.

In the afternoon, if the cloud is off the tops, take the cable car up Ulriken, the highest of Bergen's seven mountains at six hundred and forty three metres. The city, the islands, the open sea and the mouths of the fjords are all laid out from the top, there is a restaurant, and the path along the ridge to Fløyen is a four to five hour walk that many people do in the other direction.

KODE is four buildings in a row along the town lake in the middle of Bergen and holds one of the larger art collections in the Nordic countries. The reason to go is the Norwegian nineteenth century: Dahl and the romantic landscape painters who essentially invented what the rest of the world now thinks Norway looks like, plus a substantial group of Munch. There is also the country's best collection of Chinese art, left by a consul who spent his career in the East, which nobody expects.

Then walk down to the fish market for the last hour. It is not what it was, most of it is stalls selling salmon and souvenirs to visitors, and the fishermen stopped landing here long ago. It is still worth twenty minutes: the tanks of live crab and langoustine, the samples of whale and salmon caviar handed across on cocktail sticks, and the indoor hall behind it where the actual buying happens.

The station is five minutes from the market, and the airport light rail leaves from the same square.