Hamningberg

Hamningberg sits where the road stops on the outer Varanger coast, and it matters because almost everything else in Finnmark was burned in the German retreat of 1944; this hamlet was missed, so its timber buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries survive, the largest surviving group of pre-war architecture in the county. The permanent population left in the 1960s and the houses are now summer properties, maintained and protected. The drive out from Vardo is the other reason to come: forty kilometres of coast road through a landscape of bare folded sedimentary rock, sea stacks and tundra that is unlike anywhere else in Norway. The road closes for winter, usually from October to May.

What you actually see

• The pre-war timber houses - buildings that escaped the 1944 destruction.
• The coastal road - forty kilometres of bare folded rock and sea stacks.
• The empty hamlet - summer-only occupancy with no permanent residents.
• The Arctic shore - beaches of pale stone facing the Barents Sea.

When to go

June to August, the only months the road is reliably open; it closes in autumn and reopens in late spring. The midnight sun runs from mid-May to late July. Fog is common on this coast.

Honest expectations

The road is open only a few months a year, and there are no services at Hamningberg: no shop, cafe, fuel or accommodation. The houses are private. Weather can turn cold and foggy in July.

Nearby

Vardo and its fortress are at the road's other end; the Varanger peninsula tundra lies inland.