Lillehammer

The name means "little Hamar", taken from an old farm called Hamar where the first parish church stood, to tell it apart from the town of Hamar to the south. Tradition holds that it was here, in 1205, that the Birkebeiners Torstein Skjevla and Skjervald Skrukka joined the infant king's son Haakon before carrying him on skis to safety — the escape still commemorated by the ski marathon that ends in the town.

Lillehammer was granted market town rights on 7 August 1827, when just 50 people lived within its boundaries; within two years there were 360. The site was chosen because there was no other town in the county and because it stood on the Gudbrandsdalslågen river, on the main route through the valley from the capital to the north. The merchant Ludvig Wiese is counted as its founder. After the railway from Christiania to Eidsvoll was finished in 1852, steamships on Mjøsa linked it to Lillehammer, and from there a new road ran up the valley. The railway itself reached the town in 1894.

In 1904 the town bought Anders Sandvig's collection of old Gudbrandsdal houses and founded Maihaugen. The novelist Sigrid Undset made her home at Bjerkebæk from 1919. In 1964 the town, then of about 5,900 people, merged with the much larger rural municipality of Fåberg. Lillehammer hosted the 1994 Winter Olympics, for which the railway station was given a major overhaul, and later the 2016 Winter Youth Olympics. In 2017 it was named a UNESCO City of Literature.

Winter sport shapes the town's identity more than anything else. The 1994 Olympics left a complete set of venues — the Lysgårdsbakken jumps, the Birkebeineren stadium for cross-country skiing and biathlon and the alpine slopes of Hafjell and Kvitfjell up the valley. The Birkebeinerrennet, run from Rena over the mountains since 1932, finishes here each March, and the town's coat of arms shows a Birkebeiner skiing with spear and shield.

Literature is the other strand. Sigrid Undset, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928, lived at Bjerkebæk for two decades, and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's farm at Aulestad is nearby. The Norwegian Festival of Literature, the biggest non-commercial literary festival in the Nordic countries, has been held every year since 1995, and in 2017 UNESCO named Lillehammer a City of Literature. Smaller festivals cover pop, jazz and young film-makers, and Vinterpride, a winter LGBT pride festival, is held every February.

Maihaugen keeps the folk culture of Gudbrandsdalen on show — carved log farmhouses, the Garmo stave church and the crafts of the valley — and the bunad, the folk costume, is worn on Constitution Day and at weddings.

The town of Lillehammer had 21,677 people in 2025; the wider municipality stretches into the villages of Fåberg and the mountains on both sides of the valley. Most people live in the town districts such as Nordre Ål, Søre Ål, Vingnes and Busmoen, and the municipality's population grew by 6.4 per cent over a recent ten-year period.

The economy rests on the town's position at the northern end of Mjøsa and as the gateway to Gudbrandsdalen, through which the historic road from Oslo to Trondheim passes. It houses one of the two county administrations of Innlandet, and a campus of the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences lies just north of the town; tourism — skiing in winter, the museums and mountains in summer — supports many jobs.

Life follows the seasons. Winter means skiing at the Olympic venues and on the mountains above the town; in summer the lake, the river and the mountain trails take over. Storgata, the pedestrian street, is where the town meets, shops and eats out.

Gudbrandsdalen gave its name to Norway's most popular brown cheese. Brunost, the brown whey cheese, is often simply called Gudbrandsdalsost, "Gudbrandsdal cheese", after its most popular variety, and the modern firm, rich version is attributed to the milkmaid Anne Hov, who in 1863, at a mountain farm near Gålå further up the valley, began adding cream to the whey and boiling it down in an iron pot.

The valley has long farmed grain and dairy, and its traditional food includes lefse, a soft flatbread made from potato, milk or cream and flour, and the hearty home dishes of inland Norway, such as fårikål, the mutton and cabbage stew counted as the national dish, in autumn. Kjøttkaker, meat patties of ground beef and onion served with a brown sauce, are another everyday dish across the country.

Eating out centres on Storgata, where restaurants, cafés and bakeries occupy the old wooden houses of the pedestrian street; Lillehammer Bakeri, at its northern end, sells hand-made breads and rolls.