During our second ever visit to Stavanger, Norway we’d already taken a look around a couple of museums – the Norwegian Printing and Canning Museums – and reminded ourselves just how pretty the old town buildings of Gamle Stavanger were, and the next stop for us was another museum because you can never visit too many museums when you’re travelling.

The Stavanger Maritime Museum is located within old waterfront merchant buildings, and if you’re visiting Stavanger by cruise ship then they’re a few minutes away from where your ship is likely docked. Rather than a somewhat staid history of maritime industry in this part of Norway, the exhibitions feature authentically decorated and accurately reconstructed representations of businesses instead. This makes for a lovely leap back in time and a very nice way to spend some time ashore.

It’s no secret that we like to cruise – we were visiting Norway on Britannia on this occasion, after all – so it was nice to see some historical nods to cruising featured in the form of vintage posters. The ships featured below are the Sagafjord and Stavangerfjord, both operated by the now-defunct Norwegian America Line. It’s great to see the stylish depiction of the ballroom and unsurprising to see the cabin layouts from the 1960s haven’t really changed at all to now.

The exhibitions in Stavanger Maritime Museum included the Monsen family’s office, the authentic location for shipowners who operated for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there. Reconstructions of a merchant’s home from the early part of the twentieth century and a general store from the same period, as well as a sailmaker’s loft space completed the spaces on show. It was all very well done, nicely laid out, easy to get around, and full of fascinating little details. We particularly liked the incredibly ornate telephone in one of the rooms.

A very nice museum indeed. This was less a place to learn anything new and more a place to absorb some of the feel of the local history, and we very much enjoyed doing just that.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll explore a little bit more of Stavanger on foot, taking in the very attractive, very colourful area of Fargegaten.

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