Things to do
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Gamle Stavanger
Around 170 white timber houses from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on cobbled lanes above the harbour, saved from demolition in the 1950s. All of them are lived in, so it is a quiet quarter to walk rather than a museum street.
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Kjeragbolten
A boulder wedged in a crevice a thousand metres above the Lysefjord, reached by a hard ten kilometre return walk over three steep chained sections. The season runs roughly June to September, the road in from Lysebotn closes with the snow, and the walk is a full day rather than an afternoon.
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Preikestolen
Walk out onto a flat shelf of rock with the Lysefjord straight below you and the fjord running away in both directions. It is one of Norway's most popular mountain walks, and a fit walker reaches that view in a morning from the car park.
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Stavanger domkirke
Begun about 1100 and the only cathedral in the country to keep its medieval plan unaltered, with an Anglo-Norman nave running into a Gothic choir. A five year restoration finished for its nine hundredth anniversary in 2025. The nave is open outside service times and a short visit is enough.
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Eilert Smith Hotel
A 1930s functionalist warehouse on the old quay turned into a hotel of twelve rooms, keeping the concrete frame and the crane rail. The kitchen in the building holds two stars and is the reason most guests book it. Rooms face the water and the quay traffic starts early.
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Norsk hermetikkmuseum
A canning factory of 1916 kept as it worked, in the quarter where half the city was once employed smoking and tinning brisling. On demonstration days the smoking ovens are lit and the tins are still soldered by hand. The smell of smoked brisling carries down the street on those days.
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Norsk Oljemuseum
The national petroleum museum on the harbour, in a building of steel and concrete drums meant to read as a platform. It is unusually frank about what the industry did to the country and holds a real drilling deck, an escape capsule and the Alexander Kielland disaster in full.
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Solastranden
Two and a half kilometres of open sand facing the North Sea south of the airport, and the longest beach on this coast. The wind that makes it cold makes it one of the better places in the country to learn to kitesurf.
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Sverd i fjell
Three bronze swords ten metres high driven into the rock at Hafrsfjord, marking the battle of about 872 that first brought the country under one king. The largest is Harald Fairhair's; the site is open shore with a path along the water.
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Valbergtårnet
A watchman's tower of 1853 on the highest point of the old town, built to spot fires in the timber quarters below. The climb is short and gives the full circle over harbour, cathedral and the white houses. The lanes up to it from the quay are steep and briefly confusing.
