Voss

Everyone says Voss, but the town itself is Vossevangen, on the north-east shore of the lake Vangsvatnet. It lies in a wide, open valley with farms on every slope and mountains all round, and the railway and the E16 between Bergen and Oslo both run straight through. Step off the train and you're in the middle of it: the lake on one side, the gondola station above you, and a short walk away the grey stone church, Vangskyrkja, finished in 1277.

The town is the shopping and service centre for a big inland district, but it's best known for the outdoors. Rivers give white water for rafting and kayaking, skydivers drop over the airstrip at Bømoen, and in winter the lifts take you up to the ski slopes. Every year in the last week of June the town hosts Ekstremsportveko, the Extreme Sports Week. Vangen comes from vang, a meadow, after the field between the church and the lake. Voss itself goes back to Old Norse Vǫrs, and nobody is sure what it meant, perhaps once the name of the lake.

Local knowledge: after Germany invaded Norway on 9 April 1940, Bergen fell on the first day, and Voss became the place where the Norwegian army in the west gathered its men. German troops coming from Bergen and Hardanger met hard resistance, and to break it the Luftwaffe bombed Vossevangen on 23 and 24 April. Around 85 houses were lost, and the old wooden centre was gone. One bomb landed on the church roof and slid off without doing much harm. German forces marched in on 26 April. When the town was rebuilt, the streets were raised with fill from the slate quarries to keep floods from the lake out, which is why the centre looks so much newer than its church.

Visiting: the pin points to the tourist information at street level under the Voss Gondol, by the station. It's open all year and books activities and round trips. The gondola climbs to Hangurstoppen at 820 metres in under nine minutes. East of the church stands Olavskrossen, a stone cross that tradition says King Olav raised when the people of Voss were made Christian in 1023. A memorial in town remembers Knute Rockne, the Notre Dame football coach, who came from Voss and left for Chicago at five. On a rainy day, swim at Vossabadet, or see the Voss Folk Museum at Mølstertunet, a farmyard of 17 old houses left as they were when the last families moved out in the 1920s. Out of town, Tvindefossen falls right beside the E16.

Fact sheet

• People: 7.130 in Voss, 16.438 in Voss municipality
• County: Vestland
• Typical industries: hotels and other accommodation, farming, mostly cattle and sheep, road and rail transport

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).