Our travel to Bergen via Amsterdam was smooth and uneventful, if a little too short to permit much sleep. As is our pattern, we spent most of the day walking around Bergen, learning about the city and its natural and human history. We walked at least seven miles in these explorations.
Bergen is centered on its harbor; while not exactly a fjord, the hillsides are quite steep. A significant part of Bergen’s history and culture stems from its role in the Hanseatic trading consortium of the 1400-1800’s. Mercantile and housing blocks are being refurbished for use by boutiques after centuries of rot, settling and fire had taken their toll.
We walked up to the castle grounds, a high plateau at one end of the harbor. The oldest section dates from the 11th century while other buildings were added in the 14th to 17th. Several of the buildings were damaged in 1944 and have been recently repaired. The castle only participated in a battle once (in 1665) and that was actually a mistake caused by slow messengers. The castle should have looked the other way while an English/Norwegian alliance plundered a danish ship. But the Norwegians didn’t get the message so they shelled the English ships in order to protect Bergen’s neutrality.
All cities have unusual museums— Bergen’s is a Leprosy Museum as the bacterium was discovered in Bergen in the late 1880’s. And walking backstreets allowed
us to see details of house construction over the years including interesting forms of wooden siding and beautiful slate roofs. Of course we also did some birding as we walked around: 16 species with 8 of them new to us.
