Northern Europe
The Norwegian Fjords
Water so still it doubles the mountains. Waterfalls that fall for a kilometre. Villages of twelve red houses and one church, reachable only by sea.
The fjords were carved by ice over three million years, and they remain the province of ships. Roads wind and tunnel and give up; the water simply arrives. Aboard Meridian Solstice you sail the full length of the UNESCO-listed Nærøyfjord, where the walls narrow to 250 metres and rise more than 1,700 — close enough to hear the Seven Sisters waterfall before you see it.
Our Norwegian voyages are timed for the light: in June and July the sun barely sets above 62° north, and dinner on the terrace stretches into a golden evening that never quite ends.
Ports & places
Where we call
Sail beneath the Seven Sisters and the Suitor waterfalls, then tender ashore to a village of 250 people at the head of fifteen kilometres of still, black-green water.
Ride the Flåmsbana railway — twenty kilometres, 866 metres of climb, twenty tunnels — then rejoin the ship where the fjord narrows to a stone corridor.
Rebuilt in stone and turrets after the fire of 1904, Ålesund is Norway's most beautiful town. Climb the 418 steps to Aksla for the archipelago view.
The Arctic capital: a cathedral of glass, a polar museum, and — from late May to late July — a sun that circles the sky without setting.
Walk the valley path to a blue arm of Europe's largest mainland glacier, through meadows loud with meltwater.
In the frame
The light of the place
