Bergen Audio Tours

Bergen receives around 2,200 millimeters of rain per year, more than any other major city in Western Europe. This is something Bergensers will tell you themselves before you have a chance to notice the grey sky, because acknowledging the rain is part of the local personality. The city sits in a valley between seven mountains, and the moisture that rolls in from the Atlantic finds the bowl and stays. What the rain does for Bergen is keep everything green, and the wooden houses of Bryggen on the waterfront, painted in ochre, red, and sienna, look saturated and vivid in wet light in a way that photographs almost never capture.

Bryggen, the old Hanseatic wharf, has been a trading post since the 14th century and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The narrow alleys between the old wooden warehouse buildings lead to small workshops and artisan shops where the structure of the medieval trading post, rebuilt repeatedly after fires, is still legible. The Hanseatic Museum in one of the original warehouses recreates the life of the German merchants who controlled Bergen's fish trade for three centuries, sleeping in unheated wooden bunks to protect the fish stocks from their body heat.