Trondheim

The city's whole story turns on one man's death. Olav Haraldsson was a Viking warlord who came home from raiding abroad determined to weld Norway into a single Christian kingdom. His methods made enemies, and in 1030 his own countrymen killed him at the Battle of Stiklestad, a day's ride to the north. Almost at once strange stories spread — his body was said not to decay, and the sick who touched it were healed — and within a year the fallen king was a saint. Pilgrims began walking to his grave in Nidaros, as Trondheim was then called, and over it Norway raised a cathedral of pale local soapstone, the northernmost great church of the Middle Ages. For centuries kings came here to be crowned; the Norwegian crown jewels still rest inside, and today's royals are blessed beneath its rose window.

Around the cathedral grew a city built almost entirely of timber, and timber burns. Trondheim has caught fire again and again; after a devastating blaze in 1681 a Luxembourg-born general named Cicignon redrew it with broad, straight avenues meant to stop the flames from leaping, giving the centre its unusually open feel. From the same period comes the red-portalled Gamle Bybro, the "old town bridge," whose arch — known as the Gate of Fortune — frames the most photographed view in the city: a row of old merchant warehouses on wooden stilts rising straight out of the river. Across the water lies Bakklandet, a district of leaning 18th-century houses in mustard, ochre and oxblood, now all cobbles and cafés.

Trondheim never became a metropolis, and that is its charm. It is Norway's technology capital, home to the NTNU university and tens of thousands of students who fill its bicycles and bars, yet you can walk the whole old centre in an afternoon. At midsummer the northern sky barely darkens and the river glows past midnight; in winter the town lies snow-quiet in lantern light. Each July the Olavsfest festival brings medieval music and markets back to the cathedral close, and pilgrims still arrive on foot, having walked the old St Olav Ways to journey's end.