Three days in Stavanger: the oil capital of Norway, and it was built on tinned fish

Two nights on the south west coast: the best preserved medieval cathedral in the country, a quarter of white wooden cottages, and a day out on a cliff six hundred metres above a fjord.

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Stavanger
Places
7 across 3 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Stavanger has had two industries and kept the buildings from both. For a century it canned fish, smoking and packing brisling sardines in a run of small factories along the harbour, and the workers' cottages from that period are the reason the old quarter is a hillside of white wooden houses with hollyhocks against them. Then, on Christmas Eve 1969, a rig in the North Sea found the Ekofisk field, and within a decade the town had become the headquarters of an oil industry that made Norway one of the richest countries in the world.

The result is a small, prosperous, very well kept city that does not look like it is worth three days and turns out to be. The medieval cathedral has survived largely intact, which almost nothing in Norway has. The old town has more preserved wooden buildings than anywhere else in northern Europe. There is a museum about the oil that is better than any museum about oil has a right to be, and it is entirely unembarrassed about the money.

The other reason people come is an hour east. The Lysefjord runs forty two kilometres inland between walls of granite, and a flat slab of rock the size of a tennis court sticks out from one of them, six hundred metres above the water, with no railing on it. That is a whole day and for a lot of visitors it is the whole trip.

Highlights

  • A Romanesque cathedral from about 1125 that survived where every other Norwegian one burnt or was rebuilt
  • Two hundred and fifty white timber cottages on cobbled lanes, still lived in
  • A street painted in every colour by a hairdresser who thought the town was too grey
  • A flat rock platform with six hundred metres of air on three sides and no barrier at all
  • The best museum about petroleum anywhere, which is a lower bar than it deserves

Where to stay

Stavanger, two nights

Stay near the harbour. The centre is small enough that the choice barely matters, the station and the coach stands are five minutes from the water, and the old quarter is a short walk along the west side of the bay.

Two nights gives you a town day, a full day out on the fjord and a last morning for the museums, which is the shape the place naturally takes.

Day by day

Day 1 in Stavanger

The cathedral, the white town and a street of colour

The cathedral is in the middle of town and is the reason Stavanger exists: a bishopric was founded here around 1125, the town grew up round it, and the building has stood ever since without a fire taking it, which in a country of wooden towns makes it close to unique. The nave is Romanesque, with heavy round columns and cushion capitals, and the chancel behind it was rebuilt in Gothic after a fire in 1272. The pulpit is a riot of carved Baroque figures by a Scottish craftsman called Andrew Smith in the 1650s, and the stained glass at the east end is from 1957, which is a jolt but a good one.

Walk round the head of the harbour to Gamle Stavanger, the old west side. Around two hundred and fifty timber houses from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries survive on cobbled lanes here, small, white and mostly single storey, built for the people who worked in the canneries. They are privately owned and lived in, the gardens are kept immaculately, and the whole quarter was saved in the 1950s by one conservation officer arguing against a council that wanted to clear it.

In the late afternoon, Fargegaten. Øvre Holmegate was a run down shopping street until a hairdresser on it decided in the early 2000s that the town needed cheering up and got an artist to specify a colour for every building. It is now bright pink, orange, blue and yellow, houses two of the better cafés in town, and is the single most photographed street in the city. It should be awful. It is not.

  1. 14:30

    Stavanger Cathedral

    Religious

    Romanesque nave from about 1125, Gothic chancel, a wildly carved 1650s pulpit and a modern glass east end. Twenty minutes if you rush and an hour if you look.

  2. 16:00

    Gamle Stavanger

    Landmark

    Cobbled lanes of white timber cottages on the west side of the harbour, all of them lived in. Free, always open, and best in the evening when the day visitors have gone.

  3. 18:00

    Fargegaten

    Visit

    One short street given a different colour for every building, with the town's better coffee on it. Five minutes from the cathedral and worth the detour.

  4. 19:00

    Dinner by the harbour

    Eat

    Stavanger eats well for its size and prices accordingly. The Fisketorget on the quay and the restaurants along Skagen do the local shellfish; book at weekends.

With more time: The fire watch tower on the small hill behind the harbour was built in the 1850s, has a lookout gallery and a view over the inner bay, and takes ten minutes. The archaeology museum, five minutes further on, covers the prehistory of the region from the Stone Age forward and is a decent wet weather hour.

Day 2 in Stavanger

Preikestolen: a full day, and the only thing on it

The Pulpit Rock is a flat slab about twenty five metres square that broke away from the cliff along the joint planes in the granite, leaving a level platform with a sheer drop of six hundred and four metres to the Lysefjord on three sides and no railing on any of them. People sit on the edge with their legs over. Nobody makes them.

Getting there is a ferry and a bus, or a combined bus, taking about an hour and a half each way from the centre. The walk itself is four kilometres in each direction over boulder fields, stone staircases built by Nepalese sherpas brought in for the job, and a long stretch of exposed rock with the fjord opening below you. Allow four to five hours for the round trip and add time for standing about at the top, which everybody does.

It is not technical and it is not a stroll. There are steep sections, the rock is slippery in rain, and the weather changes fast enough that people get into difficulty every summer and occasionally do not come back. Take proper boots, a waterproof, more water than you think and something to eat. Do not do it in trainers, whatever the weather looks like from the car park.

Go early. The first bus of the day means you reach the top before the crowd, and the difference between eight in the morning and midday on that platform is the difference between an experience and a queue for a photograph. Back in town by late afternoon, eat something, and do nothing else.

  1. 07:30

    Preikestolen (Pulpit Rock)

    Visit

    Four kilometres each way, four to five hours in total, and six hundred metres of nothing at the end of it. Take the earliest bus, real boots and a waterproof, and check the last bus back.

  2. 12:00

    Late lunch on the trail

    Eat

    There is a lodge with food at the trailhead and nothing at all on the mountain. Carry lunch, and eat it at the top with the fjord underneath you.

With more time: If the weather has closed in or the legs are not up to it, the Lysefjord sightseeing boats from Stavanger harbour run three to four hours, pass under the Pulpit Rock from below, which gives you the scale far better than standing on it does, and go on to the Hengjane waterfall and the goats at Flørli. Kjerag, further up the same fjord, is a harder six hour walk to a boulder wedged in a crevice nearly a thousand metres above the water, and needs its own day.

Day 3 in Stavanger

Oil, sardines and the money in between

Two museums, five minutes apart, that between them explain the whole town.

The Norwegian Petroleum Museum is on the harbour in a building of steel and concrete drums meant to look like a platform, and it does something difficult, which is to explain an industry honestly to people who may disapprove of it. There is a drill bit you can turn, a diving bell, a section of platform deck, a room on the Alexander Kielland disaster of 1980 in which a rig capsized and a hundred and twenty three men died, and a straightforward account of what the money did to Norway. Two hours, and children are extremely well catered for.

Then walk into the old town for the Canning Museum, which is in an actual cannery that packed brisling sardines from 1916 until 1958. At its height Stavanger had dozens of these places and the whole town smelled of smoke. The museum still fires up the smoking ovens on certain days and hands out the results, and it keeps the machinery, the labels, which were designed and collected obsessively, and the workers' cottage next door furnished on one floor for 1920 and the other for 1960.

The station and the bus terminal are ten minutes from either.

  1. 10:00

    Norwegian Oil Museum

    Visit

    The story of Norwegian oil from the 1969 discovery on, in a building shaped like a platform. Better than it sounds, honest about the downsides, and excellent for children.

  2. 12:30

    Norwegian Canning Museum

    Visit

    A working cannery until 1958, with the ovens fired on some days and the sardines handed round. Small, hands on, and the ticket covers the town's other museums the same day.

  3. 14:30

    Stavanger Maritime Museum

    Culture

    Two old merchant warehouses on the quay covering two hundred years of shipping and trade, with a free audio guide in English. An hour, and on the same ticket.

With more time: Out at Møllebukta, four kilometres round the bay, three enormous bronze swords stand driven into the rock to mark the battle of Hafrsfjord, where Harald Fairhair is said to have united Norway in about 872. It is fifteen minutes by bus and takes ten minutes to see, but it is the most photographed thing in Stavanger after the Pulpit Rock.

Before you go

Getting in

Sola airport is fourteen kilometres south with the airport bus taking about twenty five minutes into the centre. There are frequent flights from Oslo and Bergen and direct services from London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and elsewhere in northern Europe, mostly because of the oil industry.

The train from Oslo takes about eight hours across the mountains and down the coast, which is a fine journey but a long one. From Kristiansand it is three hours.

The express boat from Bergen takes around four and a half hours down the coast and through the islands, and is a considerably better way to arrive than the bus. Colour Line and Fjord Line ferries from Hirtshals in Denmark also call here.

Getting around

The centre is walkable end to end in twenty minutes and everything in town below is inside that. The harbour is the middle of it, with the old quarter on the west side and the shops and cathedral on the east.

Kolumbus runs the buses and the local ferries on one ticket, bought in the app. Bus 6 goes to the airport.

For the Pulpit Rock, buses run from the centre to the trailhead at Preikestolen fjellstue in season, some of them combined with the ferry across the fjord. Buy the whole thing as a return and check the time of the last bus back before you set off, because a taxi from the trailhead costs more than the flight in.

When to go

April to October for the hiking, and June to August for the reliable version. The Pulpit Rock trail is snow free and staffed with rangers in high summer, and the bus and boat connections only run in season.

May and September are the sweet spot in town: everything open, half the crowds, and the light on the water in September is worth the risk of rain.

Winter is mild, wet and dark. The Pulpit Rock can be climbed in winter with crampons and a guide and should not be attempted without them. The museums, the cathedral and the wooden town carry a winter weekend perfectly well.

Stavanger is a working town that got rich and stayed tidy, and the pleasure of it is the contrast: a medieval cathedral, a hillside of fishermen's cottages, an oil museum and a granite platform in the sky, all inside three days.

Do the hike early on a clear day, and give the old town an evening once the cruise passengers have gone.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

How hard is the Pulpit Rock walk really?
It is four kilometres each way with a few hundred metres of climb, on stone steps and boulders rather than a path. A reasonably fit person with no hiking experience will manage it in four to five hours and be tired. Children do it. What catches people out is footwear, weather and starting too late. There are no facilities and no shelter on the route.
Can I do the Pulpit Rock without a car?
Yes, and most people do. Combined bus and ferry tickets from Stavanger run several times a day in season and take about ninety minutes each way. Outside the season the connections thin out sharply and a hired car becomes the practical option.
Is Stavanger worth it if I skip the hike?
For two days, yes. The cathedral, the wooden town and the two museums are a genuinely good weekend, and the Lysefjord sightseeing boat gives you the fjord without the climb. Three days without the hike would be one day too many.
Stavanger or Bergen?
Bergen is the more beautiful city, has more to do and is the better gateway to the big fjords. Stavanger is smaller, drier, cheaper on hotels and has the Pulpit Rock. If you only visit one, Bergen. If you want a hiking trip with a town attached, this one.
What else is on the Lysefjord?
Kjerag, at the far end, is a longer and harder walk to a boulder wedged between two cliff faces nearly a thousand metres up, and it is a full day from Stavanger with an early start. Flørli has four thousand four hundred wooden steps beside an old power station pipeline, which is the longest wooden staircase in the world and exactly as unpleasant as that sounds.