Oslo

• 1. Introduction

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  Oslo, the capital of Norway, had 724,290 residents in 2025, yet two thirds of its land is protected forest, hills and lakes. That pairing is no planning slogan. It follows from a site where a fjord ends and wooded ridges close in on every other side.

  People have argued about this place for a long time. They have argued about how old it is, who founded it and what it should be called. The sagas give one account of its beginnings, and archaeologists give another. The city has also changed its name more than once.

  This documentary asks how fires, royal unions, an occupation and a river's waterfalls shaped Oslo. It also asks how a city with some of the highest living costs anywhere became a testing ground for climate policy.

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• 2. A Disputed Birthday

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  The Norse sagas credit Harald Hardrada with founding Oslo around 1049, and for generations that date anchored the city's sense of its own age. Archaeology then complicated the story. Excavators found Christian burials from before AD 1000, which points to an urban settlement already in place. The city therefore held its millennium celebration in 2000 rather than waiting for 2049.

  In the Viking Age the land around the fjord lay in Viken, the northernmost province of Denmark. Control passed between Danish and Norwegian kings through the Middle Ages, and Denmark kept claiming the area until 1241.

  Under Olaf III, who reigned from 1067 to 1093, Oslo became a cultural centre for Eastern Norway. In 1174 Hovedøya Abbey was built nearby. Churches and abbeys grew into major landowners, and their wealth fed the city's economy. Late in the 12th century, Hanseatic League traders from Rostock moved in and gained strong influence. On the 25th of July 1197, King Sverre and his soldiers attacked Oslo from Hovedøya.

  Haakon V reigned from 1299 to 1319 and was the first king to live in the city permanently. Oslo has been regarded as the capital since his time. He began work on Akershus Fortress and on the Oslo Kongsgård. Then the Black Death reached Norway in 1349. Church income from land fell so sharply that Hanseatic traders came to dominate foreign trade in the 15th century. By 1380 Norway was the weaker partner in a union with Denmark. Oslo shrank to a provincial administrative centre while the monarchs lived in Copenhagen.

  The fortress that Haakon began would outlast the medieval town and eventually pull the whole city towards it.

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• 3. The Many Names

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  Peder Claussøn Friis once proposed that Oslo meant the mouth of a river called Lo, supposedly an old name for the Alna. No evidence of such a river predates his own work. The form is also ungrammatical in Norwegian, which would have required Loaros, as in Nidaros. Scholars now see the name Lo as a back-formation that Friis built to support his idea.

  Modern linguists trace Oslo to Old Norse and, in all probability, to the name of a large farm at Bjørvika. They read the early forms Óslo, Áslo and Ánslo in two ways. One reading is a meadow at the foot of a hill. The other is a meadow consecrated to the gods. Both are considered equally likely.

  The fourteenth fire to hit the wooden city came in 1624 and burned for three days. Christian IV of Denmark decided the old town would not be rebuilt. His men laid out a grid of roads near Akershus Fortress. He ordered citizens to move their shops and workplaces to a new town called Christiania, named for himself. The old site east of the Aker river survived as a suburb outside the gates, and it kept the name Oslo.

  The spelling Kristiania entered government usage in 1877. On the 1st of January 1925 the original name returned. Norway had become fully independent in 1905, and Norwegians argued that a Danish king's name did not suit the capital of their own country. The old suburb was renamed Gamlebyen, meaning the Old Town, to avoid confusion. Street names such as Oslo gate and Oslo hospital still preserve the earlier usage.

  The city has no formal coat of arms and uses a seal instead, as do Bergen and Tønsberg. The seal shows the patron saint Hallvard with his millstone and arrows, seated on a throne with lion decorations. A naked woman lies at his feet. A nickname also exists: Tigerstaden, or the Tiger City, probably inspired by an 1870 poem by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Norwegians from outside the capital use it more than the people of the Oslo region do.

  Gamle Oslo, the borough that now contains the Old Town, had 63,712 inhabitants in 2024.

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• 4. A Capital on the Rise

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  After the Great Northern War, shipbuilding and trade pushed Christiania's economy upward through the 18th century and turned it into a trading port. Then came 1811, when the Royal Frederick University, now the University of Oslo, was founded. Its late arrival reportedly hurt the nation's development.

  In 1814 the union with Denmark was dissolved and replaced by a personal union with Sweden. The provincial town of Christiania became the capital of an independent Kingdom of Norway. The new state needed offices and institutions, yet the town had almost no suitable buildings. A building programme began but moved slowly because money was tight. The population rose from about 10,000 in 1814 to 230,000 in 1900. In 1850 Christiania overtook Bergen as the most populous city in the country.

  Industry expanded from 1840, and the last decades of the century brought a spectacular building boom of apartment blocks and a renewed centre. That boom collapsed in 1899. Meanwhile the city kept absorbing land from the surrounding Aker municipality, in 1839-1859 and 1878.

  New districts followed in the 20th century, including the garden city of Ullevål, built from 1918 to 1926, and Torshov. City Hall rose between 1931 and 1950 in Vika, a former slum area. In 1948 Oslo merged with Aker, which surrounded it and was 27 times larger. Aker was a mostly affluent, green suburban community, and the merger was unpopular there. Lambertseter began to be developed in the 1950s. Aker Brygge was built from 1982 to 1998 on the site of the shipyard Akers Mekaniske Verksted.

  Building has not stopped. The Fornebu line on the metro was under construction in 2024, and more lines across the inner city are being planned.

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• 5. Fjord and Forest

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  The Oslofjord is nearly split in two by the Nesodden peninsula opposite the city, and Oslo sits in an arc at its northern tip. From the centre the built-up area spreads along three corridors, which make a shape like an upside-down reclining Y. Wide forested hills called Marka rise to the north and east, so the whole place resembles an amphitheatre. Two large forests border the city: Østmarka to the east and the much bigger Nordmarka to the north.

  The water is just as varied as the land. There are 40 islands within the city limits, the largest being Malmøya at 0.56 square kilometres. The city has 343 lakes. Maridalsvannet, at 3.91 square kilometres the largest, supplies drinking water to much of Oslo. Another lake, Sognsvann at 183 metres above sea level, served the city as a drinking source from 1876 to 1967.

  No major river reaches the sea at Oslo. Instead Akerselva drains Maridalsvannet and enters the fjord in Bjørvika, while the Alna runs through the suburb and industrial area of Groruddalen. The waterfalls on Akerselva powered some of the first modern industry in Norway in the 1840s. Later the river became a symbol of the divide between the East End and the West End. The real boundary follows Uelands street a little further west. The highest point in the city is Kirkeberget, at 629 metres.

  Daylight swings widely at this latitude. In midsummer it lasts more than 18 hours and the night never gets fully dark. In midwinter it shrinks to around 6 hours. The coldest temperature ever recorded was minus 29.6 degrees Celsius on the 21st of January 1841. On the 6th of January 2024 Blindern reached minus 23.1, its coldest reading since 1987. July 1901 holds the record for the warmest month, with a high of 35 degrees. The year 2018 was the sunniest on record, with 2133 hours of sunshine, and on the 27th of July 2018 the temperature reached 34.6 degrees.

  With so much cold and so many hills, skiing is a favourite recreation. Tryvann is the most used ski resort in Norway, and Holmenkollen hosts annual world cup events. Oslo held the Winter Olympics in 1952 and the Nordic World Ski Championships in 1930, 1966-1982 and 2011. It later bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics but withdrew on the 2nd of October 2014.

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• 6. Occupation and Attack

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  Germany invaded Norway on the 9th of April 1940. The sinking of the Blücher, among other efforts to halt the invasion, held up the occupation of Oslo by several hours. That delay gave King Haakon time to escape the city. The occupation lasted until Germany capitulated in 1945, and saboteurs harried the occupying troops throughout. On the 31st of December 1944, allied bombers missed their intended target and struck a tram, killing 79 civilians.

  On the 22nd of July 2011, a bomb tore through the Government Quarter. It damaged several buildings, among them the one that houses the Office of the Prime Minister. Eight people died in the blast. The bomber was a neo-Nazi with political motives, and the explosion was one part of the wider 2011 Norway attacks.

  On the 25th of June 2022, a gunman opened fire at a pub known for its ties to Oslo's queer community. Two people were killed and 21 others were injured. Police called it an act of Islamist terrorism, and an Iranian-born Norwegian citizen was charged with aggravated terrorism. Because of safety concerns, the pride parade planned for the 26th of June was quickly cancelled.

  The Oslo Police District is the largest in Norway, with over 2,300 employees.

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• 7. Stage and Gallery

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  Hans Linstow designed the Royal Palace, built between 1824 and 1848. He also planned the avenue called Karl Johans gate to link the palace to the city. A grand square halfway along was meant to be ringed with buildings for the university, Parliament and other institutions. Only the university buildings were ever realised as planned. Christian Heinrich Grosch designed the original Stock Exchange and the first university campus. He was one of the first architects trained entirely within Norway, and he sought help from the German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

  Later styles arrived too. Lars Backer's Skansen restaurant, finished in 1927, was the first Functionalist landmark in Oslo, though it was demolished in 1970. The Oslo Opera House, designed by the firm Snøhetta, opened in 2008. It cost 500 million euro, took five years to build and holds over 2000 seats across two houses. It was the first opera house in the world to let visitors walk on its roof.

  Not far away, the National Theatre stands between the palace and the Storting. The names of Ludvig Holberg, Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson are engraved above its main entrance. Ibsen wrote Hedda Gabler, Peer Gynt, A Doll's House and The Lady from the Sea. In 2008 a project set 69 of his quotations into the granite pavements of central streets in stainless steel lettering.

  Painters and sculptors have their own shrines. The Munch Museum holds The Scream, and Edvard Munch donated all his work to the city after his death. In Frogner Park, the free Vigeland Museum shows over 212 sculptures by Gustav Vigeland, including an obelisk and the Wheel of Life. The best loved of them may be Sinnataggen, a baby boy stamping his foot in fury.

  On the Bygdøy peninsula, the Viking Ship Museum houses three ships found at Oseberg, Gokstad and Tune. It is scheduled to reopen in 2026. Nearby, the Kon-Tiki Museum displays Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-tiki and Ra II. The Fram Museum holds the wooden ship Fram, used by Fritjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen.

  The Nobel Peace Center opened on the 11th of June 2005. The prize ceremony itself takes place in City Hall every year on the 10th of December.

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• 8. Money, Climate and Crowds

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  The GDP of Oslo reached €64 billion in 2016, which was 20% of the national total. Shipping is central to that wealth. About 1980 maritime companies with 8,500 employees operate in the city. Det Norske Veritas, headquartered at Høvik, is one of the three major maritime classification societies in the world. It has 16.5% of the world fleet in its register. Close to 6,000 ships dock at the Port of Oslo each year.

  Prices are steep. A 2011 survey by ECA International ranked Oslo the second most expensive city in the world after Tokyo. In the 2015 update of the Economist Intelligence Unit study it stood third.

  The high bills sit beside bold climate policy. In 2017, under Green Party leadership, Oslo became the first city in the world to adopt a climate budget. Every department and agency must count its emissions and cut them according to plan. The aim is a 95% cut from 1990 levels by 2030. In 2019 Oslo was selected as European Green Capital. Since 2018 non-resident cars have been banned from downtown, and 41% of all cars registered in the municipality are fully electric. Cheaper tolls, no import tax, no VAT, free parking and access to bus lanes explain much of that.

  By 2010 the population was growing at nearly 2% a year, making Oslo the fastest-growing Scandinavian capital. In 2022 immigrants and their children made up 35% of residents, with Pakistanis the largest single minority, followed by Poles, Somalis and Swedes. The pattern is uneven across the map. Some schools in the west have fewer than 5% pupils with an immigrant background, while some in the east reach 97%. In 2019 only 48.7% of residents belonged to the Church of Norway, against a national figure of 69.9%.

  Since 1947 the city has sent a Christmas tree every year, a spruce of 65 to 80 feet and 50 to 100 years old. It goes to Washington, D.C., New York City, London, Edinburgh, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Reykjavík. The gift expresses thanks to Britain for its support of Norway during World War II.

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