Kjetil's Ålesund page
July 12, 2002

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If you are interested in Ålesund, the people who live there, old relatives, the weather in Ålesund (hehe) or whatever.. Check out my new Ålesund Forum where hopefully many people will share their thoughts with us !  It's also a good starting point for locating lost relatives in the area.  You'll find my Ålesund Forum here.

New photos (christmas 2001), most of them taken in the outer/western parts of the city. As you'll see in these pictures christmas of 2001 was very snowy in Ålesund. I also captured Valderøya and Hurtigruta (one of their newest ships).

I took some photos this summer during the Cutty Sark festivities. The city was filled with sail ships of different sizes from all over the world. Lots and lots of people visited Ålesund during these days, we even had nice weather. See what I mean by clicking on these photos for larger versions.

Originally I am from Ålesund , Norway. The city has approxiomately 39.000 inhabitants and is located on the north-west coast of Norway between Bergen and Trondheim. It is a beautiful city surrounded by high mountains and deep fjords, in fact you can visit several spectacular places like Trollveggen, Trollstigen, Geiranger and Runde with this city as your base. They are all only a couple of hours travel from Ålesund city.

Large parts of Ålesund was devastated in a fire on the 23rd of January 1904. The winds helped spread the fire, resulting in a town centre left in ashes and 10.000 people homeless. The city immediately received help from all over Europe, including shipments of food and construction material from Germany's emperor William II himself, and was completely rebuilt in the Art Nouveau (Jugend) style. Today Ålesund is one of the few remaining Art Nouveau towns in the world, a very beautiful style appreciated by both inhabitants and visitors.

Let's hope this isn't destroyed by ugly "modern" buildings like the town hall (Rådhuset), which by the way should be visible on the far left side of the live photo further down on this page.

Ålesund has one of the largest export harbours in the world for "klippfisk", i.e. split, dried and salted cod. 80 % of Norways "klippfisk" exports are done in Ålesund. The export of fish to many countries such as Portugal and Brazil has made some exotic meals like Bacalao, a "national food" of the area. If you're interested in fishfood and especially Bacalao, then check out these great pages. Or you can visit a fish export company owned by an old friend of mine, Solbac Export AS.

In earlier days fish was stored in the magnificent buildings edging the city strait. Today the fish industry is located in more modern facilities outside the city and the old fish storage building are now offices, hotels, flats, etc. One of these buildings is the big yellow one in the middle of the live photo below.

The city right now !

Sunnmørsposten would not let me display their livecam images so I've taken away all links to them.

If you want more information about this area check out the nice site Nettviseren Møre og Romsdal. It's in Norwegian, but very useful. It even contains several beautiful photos from the area (Trollstigen, Geiranger, etc.). If you're looking for general information about and/or from this area, check out Sunnmøre & Sunnmøringer.

This is a picture of Ålesund. It's the standard picture found in every tourist brochure of this area, taken from Fjellstua, a restaurant on top of the city mountain Aksla. These are the western (outer) parts of the city. The strait in the middle of the picture is what gave the city it's name ("Ål" means "Eel" and "sund" is Norwegian for "strait"). If you click on this picture you will land on the Unofficial Ålesund homepage with among other things a clickable map of the city and lots of links related to this city. You can also check out the pages of Ålesund Reiselivslag , a site full of tourist info about this beautiful city. If you haven't been there, do yourself a favour and go there this summer.

This is Kongens Gate ( Kings Street ?) at Christmas 1999.  This is the old "main street" of Ålesund and where most of the shopping was done earlier.  Nowadays most of the commerce has moved out of the city to an area called Moa some 10-12 km east of the city centre.  

If you go to Ålesund for shopping only, Moa is the place for you.  If you on the other hand come to Ålesund for it's beauty, stay in the city.  And yes, there are lots of shopping possibilites, nice merchants and nice surroundings too.

There are several ways to get to Ålesund. If you are a foreign tourist you will probably visit Oslo or some other major city on your trip to Norway. The easiest way to get to Ålesund will then be to fly there using Braathens SAFE. There are several flights every day from Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim, etc.  Ålesund is a destination even for SAS.

If you don't like flying you can of course go there by car. Follow Europavei 6 (E6) northbound from Oslo or southbound from Trondheim. Turn west at Dombås and follow E136 to Ålesund. The road from Dombås to Ålesund offer some spectacular views like Trollveggen and Trollstigen depending on which route you'll choose. You'll also pass by Bjorli where my family has a cottage and I spend the Easter holidays every year. A beautiful place.

And then there's the seaway. The Norwegian Coastal Liner (Hurtigruten) passes Ålesund every day on it's way up or down the coast. It's a fantastic trip.

If you'll need a place to stay, here's a great list. Or if you want to stay outside the city check out this cabin which can be rented.

This is a birds view of Ålesund overlooking the city from the west side. This picture is taken by Steve Michael and he has more pictures on his homepage.

The white building you can see on the city mountain is the Fjellstua restaurant where I took the photo above.

In the back of this photo you can see the beginning of the high mountains called Sunnmørsalpene (the Sunnmøre Alps).

This is Latinskolen, a commercial school in which I spent some time in the 1980's. A very beautyful building built after the city fire in 1904. The main building was completed in 1907 and the annex in 1920. It represents the style so typical for Ålesund (Art Nouveau) very well.

You can look at some more images from Ålesund here or visit the Ålesund based Web site Mimer for more info about this area.

I recently took these photos in Ålesund, please click them for larger formats.

More photos from Ålesund. Here's another picture from Fjellstua and here's one taken by Marco Terranova with some light effects showing the inner harbour. Here are two pictures showing the inner harbour from the air. One is zoomed and one is not zoomed. Hilde Mari's Sightseeing in Ålesund is also worth a look. And don't forget Lycos City Guide to Ålesund !

1999 © Kjetil Nordstrand