Hereiane

At Hereiane on warm summer days one you can walk barefoot up the hill from the fjord all the way up to 400 metres elevation. The naked, furrowed bedrock often causes travellers who see it from the north side of the fjord to wonder. Why does it look like this, and why is there so little that grows here? It is a long way to the heavy metal industry in Ålvik and Odda, and there hasn’t been a forest fire in modern times.

Holdhus church

The old church at Holdhus is one of the oldest timbered churches left in the west of Norway. The new church at Eide, built in 1889, replaced the church location from the Middle Ages. As the small, tarred church lies today, in the hilly landscape at Holdhus, it was taken over by the Society for the Preservation of Norwegian Ancient Monuments, who obtained title to the property in 1900 from Hans Holdhus.

Vinnesholmen

Kvamskogen

The different bedrock types that got shoved in over Hordaland in Cambro-Silurian times still remain, layer by layer, almost like a cake. But at Kvamskogen the cake has been turned upside down.

Vesoldo

Folds are to be found everywhere in the remains of the Caledonian mountain chain. Some were formed during the collision with Greenland, others stem from the time when the mountain chain collapsed. Few can compare with the giant fold that remains in the mountain area around Tørvikenuten, Vesoldo and Hellefjellet.

Vikøy

Through Adolph Tidemand’s detailed close-ups of smokehouses in Kvam, the vicarage in Vikøy, where he lived during his painting trips through Hardanger, has obtained a central position in the Norwegian national romanticism.

Lyse chapel

The small white-painted chapel with the red brick tiled roof just south of the monastery ruins at Lyse was built in 1663 as a local chapel for the monastery estate, following the takeover of the property by the District Recorder (Stiftskriver) Niels Hanssøn Schmidt two years previously. The chapel, with its harmonic proportions, lies in the cultural landscape beside the grand monastery estate, witness to a time gone by. But even today, there is a tradition of high mass on the 2nd day of Ascension in Lyse Chapel.

Ulven

In the region of Ulven phyllite occurs with Hordaland's youngest fossils, and a beautiful quartz conglomerate. The phyllite and conglomerate got squeezed into the bottom of an ancient oceanic crust, made of gabbro and greenstone, in the heart of the Caledonide mountain chain.

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.