Located where the Sognefjord meets the Jostedalsbreen Glacier with its white and blue arms hanging down steep mountains, you’ll find Fjærland with almost 300 inhabitants. It is Norway’s official international Book Town! Visit the magical book town in Norway.
This remote small village of Mundal in Fjærland turns abandoned buildings into bookstores. The 10 second-hand bookshops in enchanting waterfront wooden houses, former ferry waiting rooms, stables, local banks and post office, below towering mountains and impressive glaciers as well as its reading material will undoubtedly charm visitors. There are more books and pine trees there than people – and the people are mighty nice.
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The Magical Book Town in Norway
Bokbyen (the Book Town) is home to a collection of whopping 150,000 used books, but they’re no ordinary libraries. If you lined the shelves up side-by-side, the town’s library would span 2.5 miles of secondhand books.
The village of Fjærland can be reached by two ferries from Bergen (or a long bus haul from Oslo). In Bergen there’s a big, modern info center at the harbor where you can buy tickets). In Fjærland there are a variety of possibilities for accommodation, food and things to do. Like old fashioned wooden hotels, a glacier museum, restaurants just beneath the glacier and next to the fjord, beautifully placed cabins for rental and activities second to none such as glacier walks, hiking and kayaking.
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Accessible by fjord and road
Ten years before the booktown became the reading hub it is today, you could only get to Fjærland by boat. The first road to the valley was built in 1986, and now there are bus routes to get in from the north or the south. In 1995, Mundal officially became the first “booktown” in Norway.
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Some of the stores are large and let readers spend hours browsing the massive library. Others are humble outdoor shelves, relying on the honor system for bookworms to pay for their new reads. The book town is officially open for business from May through mid-September, though you can buy from its extensive library online all year.
The Magical Book Town in Norway, written by Tor Kjolberg