Oppdal

Oppdal grew up in a wide, sunlit valley that has fed people well for thousands of years, a natural crossroads between the coast and the inland. That long prosperity is written into the ground at Vang, just above the village, where some 900 grave mounds and stone cairns crowd a 700-metre strip of hillside. The field was in use from around AD 400 down to about 1000, and most of the mounds were raised by farming families in the Viking Age; it is one of the largest burial grounds in all of Northern Europe. Beside it stands the white, cross-shaped wooden church of 1651. The valley still works the land much as ever: the valley is one of Norway's biggest sheep districts, with around 17,000 sheep wintered on its farms and some 42,000 grazing the peaks each summer, and it quarries the pale grey quartzite that floors and clads buildings across the country.

South of town the valley climbs toward Dovrefjell, the high plateau that has always been Norway's great barrier between north and south. Medieval kings ordered that shelter be kept for anyone crossing, and an inn has served this pass since perhaps the 1100s — then called Holet, a couple of kilometres further down Drivdalen. It won official status as a state mountain inn in 1670, and moved to the present site after a landslide in 1701, taking the name Kongsvold from Frederik IV's visit in 1704. In December 1718 Norwegian soldiers burned it down to deny shelter to a Swedish army pushing over the mountains during the Great Northern War — the same doomed invasion whose retreating soldiers would freeze to death by the thousand that winter; rebuilt two years later, it still takes in travellers today, beside a small garden of hardy alpine flowers. The rails reached Oppdal from Støren in 1919, and in 1921 the Dovre Line opened right across the mountains, linking Oppdal to Oslo and Trondheim and bringing tourists in numbers for the first time.

They still come for two wildernesses. To the south, Dovrefjell shelters Norway's musk oxen — shaggy, prehistoric-looking beasts descended from animals released between 1947 and 1953, after a first attempt in 1932 died out during the war — at least 220 at the 2026 winter count — and guided musk-ox safaris on foot are the region's signature outing. To the west rise the sharper peaks of Trollheimen. Above the town, meanwhile, ski slopes that opened with a single lift in 1952 have grown into one of the country's largest, turning a farming valley into a year-round playground.