Key takeaways
- The Naeroyfjord is a branch of the Sognefjord, Norway's longest. That is why it is so narrow: it is the thin end of a much larger system.
- Inscribed together with the Geirangerfjord as the West Norwegian Fjords. The listing is for the landform and for how people lived in it.
- At its narrowest the arm closes to around 250 metres, with walls climbing to 1,400. That ratio is what makes it feel like a corridor rather than a bay.
- Scheduled sightseeing boats work the Gudvangen to Flam run. A car ferry is a different thing and this is not one, so foot passengers only.
What it actually is
The Naeroyfjord is not an independent fjord. It is the innermost branch of the Sognefjord, which runs more than two hundred kilometres inland from the coast and is the longest and deepest in Norway. The Naeroyfjord splits off near the far end of that system and runs about seventeen kilometres to a dead end at Gudvangen.
That position is the whole explanation for its character. A fjord is a glacial valley that the sea has flooded, and the further inland you go the narrower and steeper those valleys become, because the ice was more confined. By the time you reach the Naeroyfjord you are in the thin end of the system.
The result is an arm that closes to around two hundred and fifty metres across at its tightest, with rock walls rising to something like fourteen hundred metres on either side. Standing on a deck between them is the closest thing Norway offers to being inside the landscape rather than looking at it.
Why UNESCO listed it
The West Norwegian Fjords were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2005, the Naeroyfjord together with the Geirangerfjord several hundred kilometres north. The citation is about the landform: these are held to be among the most outstanding examples of fjord landscape anywhere, in scale, in the sharpness of the transition from sea to summit, and in the number of waterfalls and hanging valleys.
But the listing is not only geological. It covers the evidence of how people lived here, which is the part visitors notice from the boat without always knowing what they are looking at: the farms.
Sites like these are usually inscribed for one thing. Getting the landform and the human record recognised together is unusual, and it is the reason the fjord is protected against the kind of development that would otherwise have arrived by now.
Rock walls closing in on both sides of the narrowest stretch
The farms on the walls
Look up as you pass and you will see clearings, and in some of them buildings, on ledges hundreds of metres above the water. These were working farms, some of them occupied into the twentieth century, on ground that had no road and in several cases no path that a modern visitor would attempt without equipment.
Access was by boat to the foot of the wall and then by ladder, or by tracks that families climbed carrying everything they owned and everything they produced. Children were reportedly roped. Whether every story told about them is true, the situation that produced the stories is visible from the deck.
They existed because flat ground is the scarce resource in a fjord, and a ledge with sun and grass was worth the climb when the alternative was no farm at all. Most were abandoned as soon as there was anywhere else to go.
What sails it
The Gudvangen to Flam run is worked by sightseeing boats rather than by a car ferry, and this is a distinction worth getting right when planning. There is no vehicle crossing here to slot a car onto; the vessels are passenger boats built for the route.
Several operators run it and the fleet has been progressively electrified over the past decade, which suits the setting: an electric vessel on a narrow fjord is close to silent, and silence in a place with walls that high is a large part of what you came for.
On this tour the crossing is one direction only, Gudvangen to Flam, with the minibus meeting you at the other end. Independent travellers can and do sail it as a return, which takes most of a day on its own.
2005
Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2005 with the Geirangerfjord, for the landform and for the farms worked on ledges above the water.
The waterfalls, and when they run
There are waterfalls the entire length of the arm, in numbers nobody counts. They come off hanging valleys, which are the tributary glacial valleys left stranded high up when the main glacier cut deeper than they did, and they drop in a series of steps or in one long fall depending on the rock.
Volume changes enormously through the year. Peak flow is the spring melt, roughly May into June depending on the winter, when the falls are loudest and most numerous. By late August many have thinned considerably and some have stopped.
This is one of the few genuine arguments for going earlier in the season rather than later, and it works against the argument for warm weather. There is no month that optimises both.
How it compares to other fjords
The Geirangerfjord, its co-listed twin, is shorter, has the more famous individual waterfalls and is busier with large cruise ships. The Naeroyfjord is narrower and less visited by big vessels, partly because getting a ship of that size into it is not straightforward.
The Lysefjord near Stavanger has the celebrated cliff at Preikestolen but is wider through most of its length. The Hardangerfjord to the south is gentler, greener and more agricultural.
What the Naeroyfjord has that the others do not is the sense of enclosure. On the narrow stretch you are in a corridor of rock, and that specific experience is what the two hours from Gudvangen buy.
