Grimstad

Grimstad sits at the end of a narrow bay off the Groosefjord. The old centre is small and easy to walk: crooked lanes, steep little streets and wooden houses from the 1700s and 1800s, many of them listed, packed around the harbour. A thin spit, Torskeholmen, splits the harbour in two, with the guest harbour on one side and the industrial quay on the other. About 15.300 people live here, and the University of Agder has a campus in town.

Henrik Ibsen came to Grimstad at 15 as an apprentice in the pharmacy and stayed until 1850. At 18 he had a son with a servant girl ten years older than him, and at night he read for his university exams and wrote Catilina, his first play, published under the name Brynjolf Bjarme. Later came Knut Hamsun, who bought the manor Nørholm on the coast south-west of town in 1918 and lived there until he died in 1952.

Local knowledge: the name was once Grømstad. Grøm is an old farm name made from Gróa, the river that grows fast, and -stad comes from Old Norse stǫð, a landing place. For a long time Grimstad was just a loading place under Arendal, and it became a town in its own right in 1816. Its great time came late in the 1800s, when it built ships. At most there were 25 shipyards around Grimstad, and in 1875 the town had 193 sailing ships on its register. When steel and steam replaced sail, that world was over.

Born here: Dag Otto Lauritzen (born 1956) won Olympic bronze in 1984 and became the first Norwegian to win a stage of the Tour de France, at Luz Ardiden on 14 July 1987. Thor Hushovd (born 1978) won ten Tour stages, the green jersey twice and the world road race title in 2010.

Visiting: the pin is on Storgaten by the harbour. The pharmacy where Ibsen worked, built in 1757, is now the Ibsen Museum and the rainy-day tip in summer, when it opens daily for guided tours, some in English. Otherwise, book ahead. The Hamsun Museum on Storgaten keeps the same summer season, and in July there are small guided tours of Hamsun's writing hut at Nørholm. Three kilometres north, by the medieval stone church at Fjære, stands a memorial stone people call Terje Vigen's grave, after Ibsen's poem. It was raised in 1906 for everyone from around Grimstad who died in the hunger years of 1807–1814. The islands off Fevik are the south-western end of Raet National Park.

Fact sheet

• People: 15.277 in Grimstad, 25.569 in Grimstad municipality
• County: Agder
• Town since: 1816 (as a trading town)
• Typical industries: farming and market gardening, higher education, with the University of Agder's Grimstad campus, building construction

Population on 1 January 2026, from Statistics Norway. Typical industries are the ones with a much bigger share of the jobs here than in Norway as a whole (Statistics Norway, 2025).