Every design for Stavanger

Stavanger counts its official founding from the year its cathedral was completed, so the old stone church in the middle of town is, in a sense, the city's birth certificate. Around it grew a town of wooden houses on the Stavanger Peninsula, and so many of them are now protected that the centre still feels like a small town, even though Stavanger has become the oil capital of Norway.

Norsk Oljemuseum on the harbour tells the newer part of the story: how the city grew rapidly once the oil industry arrived, and how Equinor, the largest company in the Nordic region, came to have its headquarters here. Ledaal and Breidablikk keep older Stavanger alive as museums, and up at Ullandhaug, Jernaldergarden på Ullandhaug reaches back further still, to the farmers of the Iron Age.

For anyone who grew up here, Stavanger is a place that has changed fast yet still feels familiar: the wind off the sea, the low land of Jæren, the three fjords of Hafrsfjord, Byfjorden and Gandsfjorden never far away.

On the map you can follow your own Stavanger: the road you took to school, the shoreline along Hafrsfjord, and the narrow lanes between wooden houses that look much as they did when your grandparents walked them.