The art nouveau museum in the old Swan Pharmacy on Apotekergata, one of the few buildings from the 1904 rebuilding whose interiors survive intact, down to the fittings and the stair hall. Its exhibits cover how a burnt-out fishing town came to be reconstructed almost wholesale in one style, and it shares a building with the KUBE art museum. It is the one place in Ålesund where the Jugendstil can be seen from the inside rather than looked up at.
An hour is enough, and the preserved 1907 pharmacy interior is the reason to come; one ticket also covers the KUBE art museum next door, so allow a little longer than the art nouveau rooms suggest.
A spare day belongs on the coastal ship. It still runs the length of Norway carrying freight and islanders alongside the cabin passengers, and in summer it calls into the Geirangerfjord on its way north, landing at Ålesund in the early evening. It is a plainer passage than the sightseeing boats, and a useful one: about four hours on the same water, used the way this coast has always used it, as a road. Ålesund, rebuilt in stone art nouveau after the 1904 fire took the timber town in a single night, is worth the stopover before flying home; the Jugendstilsenteret, the art nouveau centre inside the old Swan Pharmacy, tells the story of the fire in a building the rebuilding produced.
Seven separate streams that come over the north wall of the Geirangerfjord side by side and fall around 250 metres to the water, known in…
A fifteen kilometre branch of the Storfjord system, UNESCO listed in 2005, with walls of up to 1,400 metres coming down almost sheer to…
A mountain farm on a shelf 250 metres above the south side of the Geirangerfjord, worked until 1918, with the Seven Sisters falling on the…
Every other travel app asks you to start logging. Meridian Dispatch opens with years of your travel already written, from the photographs you already took.