The Vibrant Mount Fløyen

How many cities can claim a mountain right in their city center? Bergen is one of the few. 

_{Text: Josefine Spiro}

Standing at 320 meters (1049 feet), with a cable car shuttling both visitors and local inhabitants up and down daily, Mount Floyen is among the oldest and most popular tourist attractions in Norway.

Though Bergen is a city I have visited many times, I never bothered to ride the world-famous cable car (Fløibanen) until now. Why?  I never thought it was worth it – just for the view. After all, we have plenty of beautiful views in Norway. 

On a recent visit, however, I did eventually take the Fløibanen – and quickly realized one thing... I was wrong.

I discovered that Mount Fløyen not only offers spectacular views, both from the cable car and from a number of platforms at the top. It has cafes, art, playgrounds, free canoe paddling, swimming in a forest lake, a park for exercise, snowshoeing, a fancy treehouse, a “reading booth”, goats, mushrooms, and many hiking opportunities.

How could I have been unaware of all this? Probably because I haven’t kept track of the times.

But Anita Nybø has. After she became the managing director of Fløibanen in 2015 – and at that point, Fløyen mostly was about scenic views – attractions and activities appeared one by one on the city mountain. 

Anita greets me outside the Fløistuen Shop & Café, a few meters from the terminus of the Fløibanen. The ride took me five minutes because I got on a direct line. Had I chosen a full or halfway trip, the cable car would have stopped at four intermediate stations. There are many people living in the hills along its route, and for most of them, the Fløibanen is crucial for getting to and from work, school, and daycare. 

“Had you come at eight or half past seven in the morning, you would likely have met a lot of children. There are two kindergartens up here, both from the 70's”, says Anita.

The autumn sun is bright, so we buy ourselves two cups of coffee and sit down at a table in the café’s outdoor seating. Here, Anita starts telling me about the history of the Fløibanen.

“On April 1, 2022, we reopened after upgrading from the fourth to the fifth generation of cable cars. The new cars are four and a half meters (14,7 feet) longer than the previous ones and can fit approximately 120 passengers”.

The upgrade was wise. In 2019 – before the Covid shutdown – the Fløibanen sold nearly two million tickets of which more than 400,000 were used in July, mostly by tourists. 

A Public Health Initiative

Tourism, however, was not the driving force behind the idea of building transportation to the top of Mount Fløyen.

The idea was the brainchild of John Lund, who lived in Bergen, in 1885. His focus was on public health, and the aim was to give the residents and tourists of Bergen access to “God’s free nature”. 

The city council approved the project on one condition: The cable car had to be electric. Unfortunately, the whole project was quickly shelved due to a lack of capital, but in 1907, the idea was revived, and by April 1912, construction of the cable car began, led by Waldemar Stoud Platou, head of the Tourist Association of the city of Bergen.

“Platou, and a few other rich people he knew in the city, had been to Switzerland and seen a funicular. They wanted to build the same thing in Bergen”, says Nybø. 

Due to the First World War and a shortage of goods – and because the people of Bergen had difficulties agreeing on where the route ought to be situated – the construction process took a long time, but on January 15, 1918, the Fløibanen was finally able to take its first passengers to the top of the city mountain.

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After finishing our coffee, Anita and I begin a stroll around the top of the mountain. In the immediate vicinity of the Fløibanen, we find the Troll Park with wooden ‘troll arts’. This attraction has been here for at least a decade. 

“But as the figures are made of wood, these trolls cannot stand the outdoor environment for long, which is why we recently brought in a few new carvings. As you can see, we no longer only have trolls; we also have a pig”, Anita says, smiling.

“But that troll…”, she continues, pointing to a large sculpture next to the playground, right in between the Fløibanen and a restaurant; “…is one of the most photographed items up here. He looks a bit disheveled now, but 4-5 years ago, he went to a ‘spa retreatment’ in Trondheim for over a month. When he returned, he was all freshly painted and beautiful looking with hair on his head. It only lasted a week until someone tore it off, but he is still very inviting”.

Other popular attractions at the top of the Fløibanen are Tufteparken (a calisthenics park) directly behind the Fløistuen café and the small telephone booth next to the outdoor seating. Yes, you read that right: There is in fact an old, red telephone booth. It has been protected since 2007 when the National Archives and the Norwegian tele-company Telenor signed an agreement to preserve 100 of the remaining 420 red telephone booths in Norway. Today, they have been transformed into “reading booths”. 

“The concept is simple: You take one book with you and leave another behind. However, most people don’t bother to drag books up here, so the booth usually empties within a week”, Anita explains. 

The public libraries are responsible for refilling the reading booths, but as the books on Mount Fløyen disappear so quickly, the employees at the Fløibanen have taken matters into their own hands.

“We started bringing used books that we finished reading. We recently refilled the booth”.

Further along the way, we pass the celebrity troll and ‘Bergen’s best playground’ before continuing toward ‘Konglen’ (The Pinecone); a treetop cabin with room for up to two adults and two children under the age of ten. 

“It was a ‘Corona project’. We have always dreamed of building a treehouse on Fløyen, but as we only own the land you see in our immediate surroundings, while the Bergen municipality owns the rest of the mountain, we could not place it at the most spectacular spot”, she explains. 

Even though the treehouse does not offer the most spectacular view from Fløyen, it is at the time of writing the only ‘hotel’ in the city of Bergen with 100 percent occupancy for three months straight.

We keep on walking on a well-maintained path – one of five trails around the upper station of the Fløibanen that are all accessible for wheelchair users – with several lovely views overlooking the city. 

Very soon, we spot ten cashmere goats, bearing large, curled horns. They are grazing between the trees close to the hiking trail. Anita starts making cheerful sounds, luring the social animals towards us. They want cuddles. 

“Cashmere goats are very large compared to the goats you usually find on a farm, but these are only two years old and not fully grown”, she explains.

Good thing they’re friendly. 

Anita has an errand, so I thank her for her time before continuing my walk on my own. The path soon comes to a split. I have the choice to choose whether I want to turn left towards a small, idyllic forest lake; ‘Skomakerdiket’, and the brand-new café, ‘Skomakerstuen’, or to continue to the right, where I will find several hiking tracks. I decide on the latter and go for a refreshing walk before turning around, making the circuit around the lake. On the way, I meet a woman picking wild mushrooms.

Here at the lake, the Fløibanen company offers free canoeing and SUP (Stand Up Paddle) 

rental during the summer season. You also have the option to rent a bicycle and go for a ride on the paths. 

Snowshoe Rental

During the winter, snowshoeing is a good option. Even when the streets of Bergen are bare, there's snow on the mountain because the temperature is usually much lower.

Currently, the Fløibanen company has ten pairs of snowshoes ready to be booked. If you belong to a group of visitors and make sure to book early, the staff will even offer to join you on your tour!

Why is Fløyen so Attractive?

There is no doubt that Anita Nybø and the rest of her team at Fløibanen have worked hard to develop the destination throughout the past years, and it has been rewarding for Bergen in many ways. Over the past eight years, the company has gone from a turnover of NOK 49 million in 2015 to NOK 130 million in 2019.

However, it is at Anita states:

“You need to create activities that make the site so attractive that people want to spend their time there. And what is good for those who live here, will always be good for those who come to visit”.

In many ways, this is also the case for Havila Voyages. The shipping company’s social mission of transporting people, goods, and mail along the Norwegian coast is important and nice for those who live there. It goes without saying that it’s nice for the tourists too!

You can read more about Mount Fløyen here.