Norway is an expensive place to visit and that extends to its excursions if you’re visiting via cruise ship. When we’d looked at the options available in the port of Haugesund ahead of our cruise on Britannia in 2023 they’d not been super-exciting for us given that they mostly involved trips away from the town to look at waterfalls. We’d seen waterfalls before, and we like waterfalls, and it’s true that you can never get tired of looking at waterfalls, but you can look at the cost of getting to those waterfalls and think that maybe it can wait until another time. And that was the case for us. Despite never having been to the town before – an event that usually ensures we take a trip to get a feel for the place for any follow-up visit – we gathered enough information prior to hitting Haugesund to decide we could probably walk around and see enough on our own.
It was raining first thing in the morning so we waited a while for the worst of it to ease off before setting off for our day ashore. The views from the ship weren’t the best. Haugesund may feature in cruise itineraries marketed as visiting the Norwegian fjords but if you’re expecting stunning landscapes even under the best of weather conditions then you’re in for disappointment.
Haugesund’s rise to some prominence in this part of Norway is due to being located on a stretch of water between land masses that provided ships with a shortcut that avoided what could be troublesome waters in the open sea. Fishing and trade naturally grew up in the area and Norway’s first king lived near Haugesund and was reputedly buried near here too, but more on that in a bit.
Our cruise ship docked at one of two islands that group together with the mainland to form Haugesund. Getting to the town from Risøy involved a short walk past some lovely buildings to a bridge which was only completed in 1939. Prior to this point moving between Haugesund and Risøy required use of a ferry. You’ll see from the photos below that the water over which the bridge crosses isn’t too wide but you might notice that it’s quite a height. It’s a pretty steep bridge to ascend so consider that if you’re walking.
Haugesund might not have had the high rocky faces of the fjords surrounding it but it excelled in its architecture which was incredibly varied. Art nouveau façades, modernist concrete structure, and wooden buildings of indeterminate ages were around every corner as we threaded our way roughly along the coast northwards once we’d reached the mainland.
We passed by the bottom of a public area given over to some water features and a statue at the top. Unsurprisingly, the statue was of fishermen. If you travel to any port in Scandinavia you can more-or-less be assured that there will be a statue of fishermen. This particular statue was donated to Haugesund in 1920 and was sculpted by Sofus Madsen. When we’d made our very first trip to Norway back in 2013 we’d visited Bergen and one of the first things to have caught our eye in the city back then had been a statue of a crying boy which, it turns out, had also been made by Sofus Madsen. Always nice to find connections like that.
The most important figure in the history of Haugesund is Harald Fairhair, first king of Norway, and ruler from 872 to 930 CE. Allegedly. Details of the period are a little spotty and owe much to considerably later tales passed down through subsequent centuries. There’s doubt that he even existed. That’s just the way of things, and it’s not unique to Harald here. I’m sure you can think of plenty of people far more-widely-known for whom much has been written but who likely never existed at all. Rupert the Bear, for instance.
Harald’s name appears in several Norse sagas, and in the nineteenth century his name became more prominent in Norway during the country’s move towards independence from Sweden. Everyone needs a hero figure. It was around this time that the determination was made that Harald lived and died near Haugesund which was very handy for the town and future economic benefits from tourism.
Our walk was taking us towards the Haraldshaugen monument dedicated to the king but before we reached it we happened upon a statue to Harald Fairhair on the coastline that was surprisingly popular with visitors. We bided our time to grab a shot without anyone in the way. From this point we could also see our cruise ship docked nearby.
When you travel around Scandinavia a fair bit like we do then you recognise a Lutheran church when you see one. Skåre Church is a mid-nineteenth century place of worship built around an octagonal layout. Records dating back to the fourteenth century indicate older churches stood around this area but with Haugesund being fully established as a town in 1854 there was a need for a larger church for the community.
The nearby memorial statue to Haakon Storsteen is a little bit of a mystery. He appears to have been a local man, an engineer in the merchant navy, who died when the ship he was on sank in 1944. I would guess that his family or the nearby church raised funds for the sculpture since he doesn’t seem to be very noteworthy otherwise. You can’t just put up statues to everyone who dies, you know. The living wouldn’t be able to move.
More fabulously variable styles of architecture punctuated our walk as we continued towards the main memorial. I particularly liked the mid-century modern house.
We arrived at the open, grassy area that was Haraldshaugen but the first thing to catch our eye was a large, stone cross on a small hill, and because it was slightly closer and there were fewer visitors around it we took a look at it first.
This was Krosshaugen, one of the earliest symbols of Christianity in the whole of Norway, dating to around 1000 CE, and possibly erected when local farmers were flexible enough in their beliefs to switch deities to worship. It was good to be able to get up and close to a historical piece like this and the small hill provided for some nice views around the area.
The Haraldshaugen monument was erected and opened to the public in 1872, commemorating the thousand years since the formation of Norway as a single kingdom under Harald Fairhair. The site is considered to be the burial location of Harald but nobody’s really checked, and the monument consists of a seventeen metres-tall granite obelisk on a mound surrounded by twenty nine smaller stone monuments representing the historic counties of Norway. Fans of prime numbers will be pleased.
It was a cool, damp, blowy day when we visited Haugesund and walked to the national monument dedicated to the first king so we didn’t spend a lot of time there; just enough really to take some photos from a few angles, climb the steps to the obelisk, and take another look at the views across this part of Norway’s coastline. It was still possible to catch sight of our cruise ship from here.
We’d originally planned to walk further along the coast, and you can see some of that route in the photo above, but it had taken us a little longer to reach this point than we’d accounted for and we decided instead to head back to the main part of the town and see what we might be able to find of interest in it rather than simply admiring the views along the shoreline, lovely though that might have been. Had we had better weather then we might have chosen differently.
In the next post in this cruise travelogue series I’ll cover our look around Haugesund before we’d need to return to the ship one last time and head for home.