Svåsand

Down by the fjord at Svåsand, close to the main highway, there is a long row of boathouses, one of the well-preserved, older boathouse locations along the Hardanger fjord. It is the farms at Svåsand that have their boathouses here, four main farms with origins far back in time.

Nordheim

"And here these endless kingdoms and these toils for a rich working life far and wide have lain and slept for a hundred thousand years! Right up until the Voss Railway came in 1883 and woke them, like the prince in the fairytale who awakened the Sleeping Beauty."

Ole Bull-akademiet

Sigbjørn Berhoft Osa and Ole Bull - Akademiet

Rekve

Rekvemylna

If you enter the farmyard at Rekve, some kilometres from Bulken, where the road departs to Giljarhus, you no longer meet “the miller”, Knut Hernes, in his old rural mill. But some years ago he would wish you welcome, friendly and hospitable, and show you around his mill, which had been his workplace for a generation. As light-footed as a youth he climbed in steep ladders high up into the waterfall, to let the water down on to the waterwheel.

Grødalshaug

At the bottom of Vargavågen on Halhjem lies Grødalshaug, a 30 metres high rocky outcrop between the bay and a moist valley cleft. On the south side of the rock is a steep rock cliff facing the valley, the bog and the stream. On this rock face we find rock carvings from the Bronze Age.

Vargavågen

Sålesnes

Jondal has one of the country’s oldest slate quarries. Roof tiles have been extracted here since the end of the 1700s, but the quarry is much older. Kvernurdi is mentioned in a diploma in 1421, when Bård Sigurdsson at Torsnes became the owner through a settlement. Already then it must have been customary to cut millstones here.

Lysøen

Lysøen, this fairytale castle with its Russian-inspired onion dome on the corner turret, stands as a reminder of the diversity of the period called Historicism and a monument to a versatile artist; a key figure in the Norwegian National Romanticism.