The Coastal Heritage Museum

We’re now approaching Stadsbygd to the north, home to one of Norway’s most important cultural heritage museums: Kystens Arv — The Coastal Heritage Museum. This museum preserves the knowledge, craftsmanship, and stories that shaped coastal life for centuries. You’ll find everything from hand-built wooden boats and fishing gear to ropes, rowing traditions, and everyday life by the sea. At the museum, you can watch skilled boatbuilders at work using the ancient clinker-building method — the same technique used by the Vikings. This tradition is so valuable that it has been inscribed on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. For hundreds of years, Stadsbygd has been a key hub along the fjord — a harbor, a trading post, and a gathering place for coastal communities. People here lived in close harmony with the sea: they fished, rowed, sailed, and built the boats that carried them out into the wider world. That’s how it often was in small coastal communities: they lived off the land and sea, and came together to build homes, boats, churches — and a shared future.