Ålesund

The district was settled long before the town. Legend makes Rollo, the founder of the line of the dukes of Normandy, a native of the island of Giske to the north-west, and his statue stands in the town park. In the Middle Ages the local market town was Borgund, a trading place a little to the east around the stone church built around 1300; it declined in the 14th and 15th centuries and probably lay deserted by the 1500s. The modern town grew from a small trading post on the islands, gaining limited trading rights in 1793 and the status of a market town in 1848. It lived from the fish trade, and its population rose from 482 in 1835 to 11,777 by 1900.

On the night of 23 January 1904 fire, driven by a gale, destroyed almost the whole wooden centre. Only one person died, but more than 10,000 were left homeless. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had often holidayed in Sunnmøre, sent four warships with materials for shelters. The town was rebuilt in stone, brick and mortar in the Art Nouveau style of the day, designed by around 20 master builders and 30 Norwegian architects, most of the work finished between 1904 and 1907.

During the German occupation Ålesund was known as "Little London" for its resistance work and its part in the escape boats to Scotland and England. In 1968 the town merged with the surrounding Borgund Municipality, more than doubling its population, and the island of Sula was separated again in 1977, although the town's built-up area still spills onto it.

The rebuilt town is Ålesund's identity. Its unusually uniform Art Nouveau architecture, almost all of it from the years just after the fire, is studied at the national Art Nouveau Centre in the old Swan Pharmacy, and the town belongs to a European network for the study and protection of Art Nouveau founded in 1999. The gratitude to the German emperor who helped after the fire is still visible: one of the busiest streets bears his name, honouring Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The coast shapes the rest. The Sunnmøre Museum, founded in 1931, is devoted to the coastal culture and way of life, with a large boat collection and more than 55 old houses, and the Atlantic Sea-Park shows the sea life of the waters just offshore. The local newspaper, Sunnmørsposten, has been published since 1882, and the town hosts a branch of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology with about 1,800 students.

Football is the town's great shared passion. Aalesunds FK, founded in 1914, reached the top division for the first time in 2003 and won the Norwegian Cup in 2009 and 2011; its supporters' club is called Stormen.

The town had about 55,700 people in 2024, about 46,500 of them in Ålesund Municipality and the rest across the boundary in Sula Municipality; it is the ninth-largest town in Norway and the regional centre of Sunnmøre. Its old core is squeezed onto a few islands, and newer housing and a second commercial centre around the shopping malls at Moa have grown on the mainland to the east.

The economy rests on the sea. Ålesund is one of Norway's major fishing ports, it ranks third among Norwegian cities for registered shipping fleets, after Oslo and Bergen, and maritime industries remain very important. The Norwegian Coastal Administration has its headquarters here, and cruise ships and the coastal ferry bring visitors to the quays all summer; since 2022 shore-power connections have let ships switch off their engines in port.

Life follows the weather and the water. Townspeople walk up Aksla and along the shore at Tueneset, ferries and undersea tunnels link the islands, and the long, dark winters are mild and wet rather than snowy, with skiing in the mountains inland.

Ålesund grew rich on klippfisk, literally "cliff-fish": cod that is salted and then dried, once spread out on bare coastal rocks and today usually dried indoors, and sold mainly to the markets of southern Europe. Klippfisk is still the local speciality, and a dish made from it that is known in the town simply as bacalao is a local favourite that is not easy to find in other parts of the world.

Fresh fish and shellfish fill the rest of the menu. The town's restaurants range from seafood places on the harbour, where the fish of the day comes from local boats, to cheap pizza, kebab and burger bars around the town square. The café at Fjellstua on top of Aksla, founded in 1903, is the oldest place serving food in the town. The town also hosts the annual Norwegian Food Festival.

From the wider region come sveler, thick griddle cakes folded with butter and sugar or brown cheese, sold on Møre og Romsdal's ferries since 1971, and raspeball or komle, potato dumplings served with salted meat that appear on Thursday menus across western Norway.