Eighteen carefully selected roads in Norway will be designated National Tourist Routes by 2012. National Tourist Routes are roads that take you through the most beautiful scenery Norway has to offer. Half of the routes are in Fjord Norway.
They will be further developed and improved until 2020 to become high-quality national tourist attractions. Picnic areas with exciting architecture have been built along the routes to enable road users to enjoy the views, experience the weather, take photos, have a bite to eat and explore the unique Norwegian scenery.
These routes are designated with this logo.
National Tourist Route Jæren
Jæren with open skies, wide horizons and endless ocean. Constantly changing weather and light. Mile upon mile of sandy beaches and sand dunes, only broken by boulders and salmon rivers. This is Norway’s food basket with intensive agriculture in a flat, vast and well-kept cultural landscape, in an area with a mild climate the year round. The Jæren coast is open to the sea and has always been regarded as one of the most dangerous stretches of the entire Norwegian coastline. Work on constructing lighthouses began in the mid 19th century. The aim was to lead North Sea shipping safely along the Jæren coast in bad weather, darkness and fog. Over the years a number of new lighthouses were built, with the Kvassheim Light, completed in 1912, the last of them. Read more about: National Tourist Route Jæren
National Tourist Route Ryfylke
Ryfylke offers the traveller a varied, beautiful and fertile landscape, where green idyllic skerries and well-kept cultural landscapes are suddenly replaced by rockslides, polished cliffs, mountains and fjords. Along the way you pass villages, towns and cultural attractions like old industrial buildings and the abandoned 19th century zinc mines at Allmannajuvet. The smelting plants of the town of Sauda, deep in the mountains and waterfalls of Ryfylke, offer a good starting point for a trip through Norwegian industrial history. A detour south from the road brings the traveller to Preikestolhytta, from which a prepared path goes up to the famous Pulpit Rock, with its magnificent but dizzying view over Lysefjord.
Read more about: National Tourist Route Ryfylke
National Tourist Route Hardanger
From the open, unique scenery and Arctic climate of Northern Europe’s biggest mountain plateau to the lush scenery of Western Norway. The waterfalls, fjords, mountains and glaciers of Hardanger have been attracting tourists for more than a hundred years. You can visit the impressive Vøringsfossen waterfall with its perpendicular 145-metre fall, or stop at fruit farms beside the road and buy freshly picked fruit from July to October.
Read more about: National Tourist Route Hardanger
National Tourist Route Aurlandsfjellet
The road over Aurlandsfjell is a journey across a barren plateau of desolate landscape of snow and rocks with the occasional sprig of grass. A thousand metres down inside the mountain, motorists are passing through the blue and green light of the three mountain halls of the Lærdal Tunnel, at 24.5 kilometres the worlds longest. Both roads connect the pulsating tourist villages of Aurland and Lærdal in the heart of Sogn. Together, they make up a round trip of contrasts and an experience of the mountain from both inside and outside.
Travelling from Lærdal, the view that opens up on the descent towards the dramatic fjord landscape in and around Aurland is astounding, with the award-winning Stegastein viewpoint as the pièce de résistance. Made of laminated timber and steel, this platform sticking 30 metres out into thin air, 600 metres above the fjord gives the landscape a whole new dimension.
Read more about: National Tourist Route Aurlandsfjellet
National Tourist Route Gaularfjellet
The road over Gaularfjell takes the traveller into Fosseheimen from the mighty Sognefjord, which is Norway’s longest and deepest fjord. The protected Gaular waterway, with its many lively rapids and waterfalls and shining lakes, is like a row of pearls along the road. The drive is exciting and varied, along narrow fjords, on twisting roads up steep mountainsides, over high mountains to sheltered valleys.
The future Gaularfjellet National Tourist Route runs between Balestrand and Moskog and is 84 kilometres in length.
Read more about: National Tourist Route Gaularfjellet
National Tourist Route Sognefjellet
From the innermost part of the Sognefjord, the road winds its way between the fjords and valleys through the Jotunheimen mountains, across an alpine landscape with blue ice, jagged peaks and emerald green mountain lakes. The highest mountain pass in Northern Europe, it passes the Fantesteinen rock at an altitude of 1,434 metres. This pass, which is closed in winter, has been an important means of communication between eastern and western Norway throughout history.
Read more about: National Tourist Route Sognefjellet
National Tourist Route, the Old Strynefjellsvegen road
This road between eastern and western Norway was built using manual labour more than 100 years ago. Now the road is a beautiful cultural monument – the old guard stones have been put back in place and the road winds its way across the mountains as it has done since it was built. This National Tourist Route is only 27 km long, its highest point is 1,139 metres and it is closed during winter.
Read more about: National Tourist Route, the Old Strynefjellsvegen road
National Tourist Route Geiranger - Trollstigen
The road winds its way down steep mountainsides and along blue-green fjords through some of the most stunning scenery in Western Norway. Cars have to climb the steep Trollstigen Road with its new, innovative viewpoint at the top, follow the river as it surges through the Gudbrandsjuvet Gorge, and on to the iconic view of the Geirangerfjord. Ever since the infancy of tourism in Norway, Geiranger and the Trollstigen Road have attracted tourists from all over the world. The Geirangerfjord and the Nærøyfjord represent the fjord landscape of Western Norway on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.
Read more about: National Tourist Route Geiranger - Trollstigen
National Tourist Route Atlanterhavsvegen
The famous Atlantic Road with its eight bridges winds like a sea serpent through the forceful ocean, over islets scoured smooth by the elements, from Kårvåg on Averøya to Vevang on the mainland. Wind and weather make for a great variety of experience, from howling storms sending breakers crashing over the road to a calm and peaceful sea.
The road was acclaimed as the construction of the twentieth century. The British newspaper “The Guardian” called this the finest tourist road in the world and told readers about its especial drama in storms.
The tourist route also includes the road onward to Bud, through the landscape of fishermen and farmers along Hustadvika. The road and the landscape offer wonderful cycling and walking opportunities.
Read more about: National Tourist Route Atlanterhavsvegen
Read more about the National Tourist Routes: www.turistveg.no