The Lofoten Road

Svolvær is the main port and the place where the trade is done. From January to April the cod come from the Barents Sea to spawn in these waters, and the town fills with boats. Above it stands the Svolværgeita, the Svolvær Goat, a rock tower with two horns between which climbers jump — a metre and a half across, with three hundred metres below.

A village built on a few rocks in the sea, linked by bridges, which was the richest cod port in the archipelago. Everywhere there are wooden racks — hjell — on which the fish dried in the wind, without salt and without fire, for three months. The football pitch here, set on a shelf of rock between the sea and the buildings, is among the most photographed in the world, and it is a village pitch, not an attraction.

White sand, turquoise water, granite mountains rising straight out of it — a beach that looks Caribbean and lies a thousand kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. The water is eight degrees. Next to it, Haukland, just as white and easier to reach. There was never much fishing here: the beach has no harbour, which is why it stayed empty while the fishing villages filled.

One of the oldest and best-preserved fishing villages in Norway, with rorbuer — the red cabins on stilts — from the nineteenth century, still in place. The red was not an aesthetic choice: iron-oxide paint was the cheapest protection available, a by-product of copper smelting. The village was once on the UNESCO list and is today a living museum, with a bakery and a workshop still at work.

A sand beach between two granite walls, reached by no road at all. You walk in, an hour and a half over a saddle, with a steep climb at the start. There is nothing there: no kiosk, no cabin, no signal. Two men lived here for a year in a hut built from driftwood and made a film about it. In autumn the beach is empty even at midday.

A village of red cabins on the water, with the Reinebringen rising vertically behind and the fjord between. It is the photograph that appears everywhere when Lofoten is mentioned, and it is one of the few places that looks exactly as it does in the picture. Reine has been a fishing village since 1743 and still lives on cod, plus tourists. From the Reinebringen, 448 metres, you see everything — up a staircase of 1,566 steps built by Nepalese sherpas.

The oldest fishing village in Lofoten, and the place from which the most reproduced photograph in the archipelago is taken: the red cabins strung along the foot of Festhelltinden, seen from the bridge towards Reine. It is the same view in every season, but in autumn, with the aurora above it, it is another thing altogether. Cod still dries on racks here, and the smell is part of the place.