Reine

Reine grew up around the Lofoten cod. For more than a thousand years cod have migrated south from the Barents Sea each winter to spawn around the islands, and the fish, dried on racks without salt into stockfish, were shipped south to Bergen and on to Europe. Reine has been a trading post since 1743 and became a centre for the local fishing industry, with its own fleet of boats, facilities for processing and marketing fish, and a little light industry.

The Second World War reached even this remote village: in December 1941 the Germans burned part of Reine in reprisal for a British raid on the Lofoten Islands. After the war fishing continued to dominate. Reine is the administrative centre of Moskenes Municipality, which covers the southern part of the island.

Fame came with the view. In the late 1970s Allers, Norway's largest weekly magazine, chose Reine as the most beautiful village in Norway, and a photograph from the mountain Reinebringen became a fixture of brochures and book covers. In 1999 the painter Ingo Kühl set up a temporary studio in a rorbu to paint the harbour and mountains. Between 2016 and 2019 a stone staircase was built up Reinebringen, turning a steep, muddy scramble into a climb most visitors can manage.

Reine's culture is that of the Lofoten fishing villages: red rorbu cabins on the shore, boats in the harbour and cod on the drying racks at the end of spring. Fishermen from all along the Norwegian coast still travel to Lofoten for the winter fishery, which usually runs from January to mid-April, and the season sets the rhythm of village life. A group of traditional fishing houses survives at the back of the village, and there is a culture centre.

The village's landscape has drawn painters and photographers, and Lofoten's light varies enormously through the year — from 24 hours of daylight in early summer to a few hours of bluish twilight around noon in midwinter. The sun sets for the last time on 9 December and rises again on 3 January. The musician and actor Hans-Erik Dyvik Husby is among those associated with Reine.

Visitors far outnumber residents in summer, and the community's small size shapes manners: people here live and work among the tourists, and courtesy around private jetties, cabins and fishing gear matters.

About 300 people live in Reine (2025), and fewer than 1,000 in the whole of Moskenes Municipality, one of the smallest in Norway by population. The municipality's population has fallen sharply over the past decade, and its heavy debt has made it hard to find a neighbour willing to merge with it.

Fishing and fish processing remain important, but tourism now matters most: despite the remote location, many thousands of people visit each year, and the rorbu cabins, cafés and boat trips depend on them. As the administrative centre, Reine holds the offices of a municipality that runs from Hamnøya to Å. The village is connected by bridges between its islands, and the E10 passes through on its way to the end of the road at Å.

Daily life swings between a busy summer, when traffic and hikers fill the narrow road, and a quiet, dark winter centred on the fishery. Across Lofoten, visitor numbers had reached about a million a year by 2017.

Lofoten is cod country. Skrei, the spawning cod that arrives off the islands in winter, is the prize catch, and mølje, poached fish with its roe and liver, is often called the national dish of the north and is eaten at winter gatherings. Cod tongues, torsketunger, are a Norwegian delicacy.

The islands' great product is stockfish, tørrfisk in Norwegian, made by slow natural drying in the open air without salt. Lofoten has the right conditions of low temperatures and constant wind; further north is too cold, further south too warm and humid. Much of it goes to Italy, where it is known as stoccafisso and is viewed as a delicacy, and several Lofoten restaurants serve baccalao. The Lofoten Stockfish Museum at Å shows the whole process from landing to export.

Eating out in Reine means a small number of places, including a café near the harbour, so many visitors self-cater in their cabins with fish bought locally and groceries brought from the larger towns.