Oslo

Oslo was founded at the end of the Viking Age, around 1040, under the name Ánslo, and Harald Hardrada established it as a trading place in 1048, east of the Akerselva river. It became a bishopric in 1070, and around 1300 Haakon V made it the capital and finished Akershus Fortress. Under the long unions with Denmark, from 1397, the town lost much of its importance.

After a fire destroyed the old town in 1624, King Christian IV had a new city built on a regular grid closer to the fortress and named it Christiania. The city served as capital through the union with Sweden from 1814 to 1905, and grew fast in the 19th century as industry spread along the Akerselva river and the city boundary took in Grünerløkka and Grønland in the 1850s. The spelling Kristiania was adopted in the 1870s–90s, and in 1925 the city took back the name Oslo, while the old suburb that had kept it became Gamlebyen, the Old Town. In 1948 Oslo merged with the surrounding municipality of Aker, many times its size.

German forces occupied the city from 1940 to 1945, and Akershus was handed back to the resistance in May 1945. After the war the shipyards closed: Aker Brygge was built on the site of one of them from 1982, and in the 2000s the container port at Bjørvika gave way to the Opera House, the Munch Museum and a new district of towers. On 22 July 2011 a bomb struck the government quarter, the first of the two attacks that day.

Oslo is the national centre of art, music and ideas. Edvard Munch bequeathed his remaining works to the city, and the first version of The Scream hangs in the National Museum; Gustav Vigeland's sculptures fill Frogner Park; and Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun lived here in the 19th century. The Norwegian National Opera and Ballet performs in Bjørvika, and the city's festival calendar runs from the Øya festival, one of the biggest in Norway, to the Oslo Jazz Festival every August.

The Nobel Peace Prize gives the city an international role: the prize is awarded in the City Hall each 10 December, and the Nobel Peace Center by the harbour tells its story. Oslo also hosts the Oslo Freedom Forum, a human-rights conference. Skiing is part of daily life rather than a holiday pursuit — Holmenkollen has held its ski festival since 1892, and the forest trails of Nordmarka are within the city limits.

An old economic and social divide runs between the West End and the East End, once symbolised by the Akerselva river. In 2022 about 35 per cent of the city's people were immigrants or children of immigrants, with the largest shares in the eastern parts of the city. On 17 May the whole city turns out for Constitution Day, with school bands, flags, bunad and ice cream.

The municipality of Oslo had about 724,000 people at the start of 2025 and the wider urban area about 1.1 million, making it by far Norway's largest city. It is the economic and governmental centre of the country and a hub of trade, banking, industry and shipping, with a large maritime sector, alongside the state, the universities and the national broadcaster.

People live in apartment blocks in the inner city — the West End flats of Frogner, the old working-class districts of Grünerløkka and Gamle Oslo in the east — and in the suburbs reached by metro, which spread into the neighbouring municipalities of Akershus. New housing districts are going up at Bjørvika, Hasle, Helsfyr, Nydalen and Sinsen, raising density around the ring roads. Most of the city's ferries are electric, as are many buses, and 41 per cent of registered cars in the municipality are fully electric.

Free time is spent outdoors as much as possible: skiing, hiking and biking in the Nordmarka forest, and swimming from the fjord islands in summer. Growth is the city's main pressure, with new districts raising density and the city's growth coming mainly from international immigration.

Fish and seafood are central to cooking in Oslo, and many restaurants also serve game all year. Norwegian home cooking appears on menus across the city: fårikål, a stew of mutton and cabbage counted as the national dish and eaten in autumn; kjøttkaker, meat patties made of ground beef and onion served with a brown sauce; and smørbrød, open sandwiches with several toppings, at lunchtime. Brunost, the sweet brown cheese made from caramelised milk sugar, is popular with bread, and lefse is a soft flatbread made with potato, milk or cream and flour.

The city is also the centre of the country's restaurant scene, from New Nordic cooking — Maaemo is the only Norwegian restaurant ever awarded three Michelin stars — to the cheap kebab shops and South Asian restaurants of Grønland. The areas around Youngstorget and Torggata, Aker Brygge and Tjuvholmen, Frogner, Majorstuen and Grünerløkka have the densest concentration of cafés and restaurants, and Mathallen, the food hall at Vulkan, gathers specialist shops and stalls under one roof.

To drink, akevitt is the traditional spirit, flavoured with caraway or dill; Norwegian linie akevitt is sent in oak barrels by ship to Australia and back, crossing the equator twice, before it is bottled.