When it was recently announced that the Rjukan-Notodden industrial area has been awarded the UNESCO world heritage stamp, we thought that this was an excellent reason to visit all of places named in the UNESCO list for Norway.

 

Of course we had been to some of them already - what might not be surprising as for example the Geiranger fjord, the historic buildings at the harbor in Bergen (Bryggen) or the Urnes stave church are among the destinations. And these are places you like to visit when living in Norway - or when spending your holidays here. But when going through the UNESCO-list, we found out that we had been to most of the places already (8 in total), only two were left. 

 

You can read about our tours to Rorøs (where we visited the heritage places and drove off the road on a very cold winter afternoon) and Alta (where we have only seen some rock art on exhibition in the - excellent - Alta museum, but still) in the travel descriptions. In addition we have been to Rjukan and Notodden a couple of times, for other reasons.

 

But what about the "Struve Geodetic Arc"? We had heard about it before but never really paid attention to it. In the UNESCO list you find the following description: "The Struve Arc is a chain of survey triangulations stretching from Hammerfest in Norway to the Black Sea, through 10 countries and over 2,820 km." Right... that didn´t really help.

Further on, it explains that it represented the first accurate measuring of a long segment of a meridian, done between 1816 and 1855 by the German astronom Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, hence the name. 4 out of the 34 still existing points are in North of Norway and you can visit them.

The one in Hammerfest is the easiest to reach and the nicest to look at (an obelisk, see picture below), but what about the others?

Point number 2 is on top of the 286m high mountain Lille-Raipas (Una Raipasas) near Alta, number 3 on the top of the mountain Luvddiidcohkka (Lodhiken) near Kautokeino and number 4 - guess where, right - on the top of the mountain Bealjasvarri/Muvravarri, again near Kautokeino.

 

The second missing destination is Vegaøyen, an archipelago just below the artic circle, consisting of a few dozends small islands. It was listed because people have been living here for at least 10.000 years, mainly surviving on fish, later on also by collecting feathers and farming.

 

Mhm, alright. Probably we would stop by when we are in the neighborhood the next time. Cannot take long, it´s a mere 900 km from our home. 

 

Should we give it a second thought, if we really want to visit ALL UNESCO places...?

World heritage places in Norway