A day around Bergen

Have your umbrella and raincoat at hand, because this lovely northern town is the rainiest in Europe. Under a downpour of rain or a few rays of lukewarm sunshine, it is however very pleasant to walk through the alleys in the hills and the picturesque harbor.

There is something more besides the famous port of Bryggen, with its colorful houses with pointed roofs.

In the morning the town sleeps late, the stores are still closed when the fishermen start setting up their kiosks along the pier: some distribute baskets of raspberries and blueberries, some carefully stack the reindeer salami in pyramids, others place the fish on the ice cubes in the displays.

Tourists start appearing in the streets, line up in some cafes to wait for attractions to open and make sure they have a freshly baked brioche. We stop at the tiny Det Lille Kaffetkompaniet for a coffee, and then take a longer break to roll out a fragrant kanelsnurrer at Godt Brød.

An endless line of tourists queues at the entrance to the Fløibanen funicular, which climbs 320 meters to a viewpoint that offers a panorama of the entire city. We prefer to walk up to the edge of the Fjellsiden district: we go back and forth, up and down the alleys that zigzag the hill ridge. Elegant wooden houses, flowery corners and colorful doors. There are few stores and restaurants, and therefore also few people around. A quiet place for a panoramic walk that offers beautiful views from the top towards the port.

We descend to Skuteviken, in the west, where among some white houses with shimmering dark ceramic roofs, we reach a secondary port. We return to the harbour passing through the defense walls, next to the Bergenhus, a medieval building nestled in a park at the edge of the district of Bryggen.

And here is the heart of Bergen, the port listed in the UNESCO treasures, which seems to have come out of a pirate fairy tale. A series of houses seamlessly forms a colorful wooden curtain facing the pier. Behind the elegantly restored facades, a network of alleys hides so narrow that you can barely catch a glimpse of the sky. It seems to be in a Disneyland style reconstruction of the port of Tortuga: a creaky and dusty wooden floor is trampled on, flanked by tall original wooden buildings that open from time to time in some small squares where there are exhibitions of paintings or other artists manufacts, that have colonized the interior spaces of these buildings, along with some cafes or restaurants.

If you want to enjoy the views of the neighborhood, wait until everything closes after 5 p.m., when Bryggen becomes again an abandoned and quiet buccaneer city. But if you want to browse through the artists' stores, you will have to share the narrow spaces with the many tourists who crowd the streets of the neighborhood.

The market has now come alive with vendors and customers, and you can sit outside and enjoy a plate of fish, a sinful hot fiskesuppe, or grab a salmon sandwich and keep walking. For those who want to have more choice, there is also the covered market, the new glass hall built on the pier, where you can have lunch with fresh fish, or be enchanted by the fish stalls that display any possible variety.

There is any kind of smoked salmon, and you just need to taste a few samples to decide to take home an embarrassing amount of fish, as happened to us.

The stores close soon, and there are some really nice ones in the central neighborhood south of the port. Spend some time, for example, in Aksdal i Muren, a nice store, housed in a historic building, which sells exclusively raincoats, an indispensable item in Norway, trust us!

It is not made for tourists, and for this reason it is even more pleasant to walk through the streets of the upper Strandsiden district, south of the canal port. Around the street Ytre Markeveien develops a beautiful residential neighborhood with white wooden houses and some viewpoints of the neighborhood on the opposite bank, Fjellsiden, like the park along Haugeveien.