Lofoten Fishing Village Peaks

About this pack

A 6-day luxury route through the Lofoten Islands' fishing villages from Leknes.

Inside the Lofoten Fishing Village Peaks trip

The route begins in Leknes, a town in Vestvågøy Municipality in Nordland county and, with 11,619 inhabitants across the wider municipality, the most populous town in Lofoten and Vesterålen; it was formally designated a "town" in 2002, and the town itself covers 2.7 square kilometres with a 2023 population of 3,763. Leknes sits in the geographical middle of the Lofoten archipelago, on the island of Vestvågøya, about 68 kilometres west of Svolvær and 65 kilometres east of the village of Å. It is one of the few towns in Lofoten that does not depend on fisheries and does not sit directly on the sea, so it lacks the traditional wooden fishing-village architecture found elsewhere in the archipelago; its harbour, Leknes Havn, is nonetheless one of Norway's most visited cruise-ship harbours, an old school building in the Fygle neighbourhood has been converted into a museum, and Hol Church stands on the town's eastern edge. Leknes Airport connects the town to Bodø and Tromsø.

West along the coast is Reine, the administrative centre of Moskenes Municipality, a fishing village on the island of Moskenesøya above the Arctic Circle, about 300 kilometres southwest of Tromsø, where Reine Church stands. The village covers just 0.28 square kilometres and had a 2023 population of 297. Reine has been a trading post since 1743 and was long a centre of the local fishing industry, with its own fleet and facilities for processing and marketing fish; in December 1941 German forces burnt part of the village in reprisal for a British raid on the Lofoten Islands. Allers, Norway's largest weekly magazine, named Reine the country's most beautiful village in the late 1970s, and a photograph of the village taken from the mountain Reinebringen, 448 metres above, has appeared on the cover of tourist brochures and books since. Between 2016 and 2019, a stone staircase was built up Reinebringen, turning a climb once considered steep and difficult into an accessible one.

Further southwest, at the end of the E10 highway — also called King Olav's Road — lies Å, a village in Moskenes Municipality about 2 kilometres southwest of Sørvågen, near the southern tip of the Lofoten archipelago. First recorded in 1567 under the spelling "Aa" (changed to "Å" only in 1917, after Norway's spelling reform), the name comes from the Old Norse á, meaning a small river. Until the 1990s Å was mainly a small fishing village specialising in stockfish; since then tourism has become its main economic activity, centred on the Lofoten Stockfish Museum and the Norwegian Fishing Village Museum.

Back along the archipelago's other side is Henningsvær, a fishing village in Vågan Municipality built across the small islands of Heimøya and Hellandsøya off the southern coast of Austvågøya, about 20 kilometres southwest of Svolvær and linked to the mainland by the Henningsvær Bridges. Its name is first recorded in 1567, combining the male name "Henning" with vær, meaning fishing village. The village covers 0.3 square kilometres with a 2023 population of 507, and its traditional fishing-village architecture, along with the climbing and diving in the surrounding waters, draws visitors to a place still built around its harbour and its church on Heimøya.

The route's final stop is Nusfjord, a fishing village in Flakstad Municipality that sits on the southern shore of the island of Flakstadøya, looking out over the Vestfjorden — the last of the archipelago's harbours on this route, tucked into the same chain of channels and skerries that link Leknes, Reine, Å and Henningsvær.

• Reine, Norway — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Å, Moskenes — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Henningsvær — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Nusfjord — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Leknes — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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Lofoten Fishing Village Peaks, in frame

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