One of the oldest and most complete fishing villages in Norway, folded into a narrow inlet on the south coast of Flakstadøya and reached by a single dead-end road off the E10. Its yellow and ochre buildings, general store and cod liver oil refinery survived because the village emptied rather than modernised, and it was named a European heritage conservation project in 1975.
The village charges to walk in, which is exactly why it stays quiet; an hour covers the quay, the cod liver oil shed and the old store, and arriving on foot from Nesland costs nothing.
The practical shape of the trip: short flights from Bodø land at Svolvær and Leknes, both with hire cars, and drivers from the mainland come in on the E10 itself, joining it near the Harstad-Narvik airport at Evenes. The car ferry from Bodø docks at Moskenes, ten minutes up the road from Reine, which is the way to start at the end and drive the islands back to front. Sleep in the rorbuer, the fishermen's winter cabins now strung out over the water at Reine, Hamnøy and Nusfjord, and book months ahead for summer. June and July are for the midnight sun; late February and March are the skrei season, when the racks fill and the aurora still owns the evenings.
A pale crescent of sand on the exposed north-west coast of Moskenesøya with no road to it, reached by an hour of walking over a boggy pass f
A 543 metre summit above Kvalvika, usually climbed as the second half of the same walk, with a broad flat top and a cantilevered slab of roc
The fishing village that supplies most photographs of Lofoten, red cabins scattered over low islands in a bay ringed by black spires. It has
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.
