Haugesund Highlights is a very grandiose way of saying “Here are a few photos of things we saw while wandering around fairly aimlessly in the town of Haugesund, Norway” but it’s also snappier and has less chance of being truncated in your favourite search engine results if you’re looking for a few descriptions of sights to see and actually use a search engine that doesn’t hide the results on page nine after eight pages of incorrect AI summaries, fictional imagery, misnamed videos, adverts, and the like.
If you’ve read the previous article in this 2023 Britannia cruise travelogue series then you’ll know that we’d already left our cruise ship Britannia and walked to the national monument Haraldshaugen, and if you’ve not read that but are interested in any of the bits in this article that reference the first post then now you know where the link to that is.
This post will take us on a walk from the monument south to Rådhusparken, the square and gardens in front of the town hall, then back to cross the bridge to Risøy, the small island at which our ship was docked, and fair warning here: there will be sculptures. Lots of them.
As mentioned in the first write-up from Haugesund, one of the things I really liked about the town and which wasn’t unduly affected by the rainy conditions of the day’s visit there was the variety of architectural styles present in the buildings. There was a lovely mix of traditional-looking houses with fish-scale roof tiles and wooden board panelling painted in a variety of muted colours as well as more modern structures. Nearer the monument it was the older style that dominated.
We had a closer look at Skåre Church on the way back. It wasn’t open, sadly, There’s a little more about its history in the previous post on this.
We next reached Byparken, a public space with grass, benches, a pavilion, and a number of sculptures dotted around. Ludolf Eide, who warrants a bust in the park, was a shipowner, merchant, chemist, bank director, and politician, perhaps owing to the small population of Haugesund in the second half of the nineteenth century and the need for locals to buckle down and take on two or three or more jobs to help out. In that lattermost occupation he served as local councillor, mayor, and vice-consul to both Britain and Denmark. Bjarne Dankel was trained in – and trained others in – church music, and after stints in other parts of Norway returned to his birthplace of Haugesund in 1971 to serve as cantor in one of its churches. Fløytespiller (“Flute Player”) was sculpted by Hanna Jessen in 1954 to celebrate the town’s centenary.
We passed more lovely examples of buildings in Haugesund before entering the more commercial area where shops and cafés were open and doing some business from the locals and tourists alike. The shops didn’t interest us, but we do like a nice sculpture and there were several animal ones here and there in the precinct area. These were by Skule Waksvik, a Norwegian sculptor who specialised in this form.
We’d been walking on a roughly straight route but I departed from it when I spotted an odd-looking sculpture off to one side. From a distance it looked like it had been adorned with garlands by the locals but this turned out to actually be part of the artwork itself. This was Gledessprederen, a 1979 piece by Fritz Røed, commissioned by Bergen Bank. It’s one of three copies of the piece. Don’t look into its eyes. That’s how it gets to you.
Our goal was to get to an open square in the town we could see on the map and the architecture started to modernise quite quickly at this point. Brutalist blocks and more abstract modernist pieces caught my eye and these not-so-historical places also served as canvases for street artists to add some splashes of colour to the place.
That square we were heading for turned out to be Rådhusparken, which had the town hall on one side, a large fountain, and a few more sculptural works of art around.
We’d noticed the name “Amanda” on several buses that had been passing us on our walk through the town. This turned out to be a sculpture by that name, named for a character in a song, and a life-size version of a far smaller award given out annually at a film festival held in Haugesund. The artist is Kristian Kvakland and this was unveiled in 1985.
City And Country is the name of the fountain that resides in Rådhusparken. Carved from red granite, this was the winning design by Nils Flakstad in a competition held just before World War II to sculpt one, but which wasn’t actually completed until 1949 for obvious war-related reasons. Imagery relating to the sea and daily life decorate the panels on the sides of the fountain’s octagonal basin.
Another shipowner got his own bust, although his wife got one too on this occasion. Knut and Elisabeth Knutsen gave back to the city in which they helped drive a lot of improvements to the infrastructure and port facilities that were also highly important to the business that gave them their wealth. The town hall in the square was built with funds from the couple in 1931 while Elisabeth later donated another large sum to improve the square itself. The Doe With Calf sculpture by Arne Vigeland (not to be confused with Gustav (see: Vigeland Park, Oslo, Norway)) was purchased with some of those funds. Another of the animal sculptures by Skule Waksvig – sea lions in a small splash pool that was popular with a little boy while we were there – completed the elements in the town hall square that caught our attention.
We started to head back towards the ship at this point, catching sight of Little Arild, a boy with sailboat sculpture by Sigurd Nome, some more of Skule Waksvig’s many animal art pieces in the town, and further examples of street art.
One of the things we’d very much liked to have done would be find a local bar and have a drink, preferably something relatively locally-produced, but the only place we could find on the map that looked like it might address this desire in Haugesund only opened one hour before our ship was due to leave. That time constraint and distance we’d need to cover to get back aboard, along with our recollection of just how steep a bridge it was we would need to traverse, plus our natural aversion to not leaving things like “getting back to the ship before it sails off” to the absolute last minute all added up to us skipping out and leaving the Hauegsund mainland behind us.
That bridge was as steep and unforgiving as we remembered it from the crossing earlier in the day, and just like then I made sure to stop a couple of times to take photos and have a short break. We’re not fit people.
Those old wooden buildings in their muted colours and variations on several designs looked lovely as we reached the ground level of Risøy and made our way to the port.
In the next post in this series we’ll be back aboard Britannia when I’ll share photos of the views seen from our balcony during the sail away from Haugesund, and then it’ll be just one day at sea before this enjoyable week’s cruise to Norway comes to an end.