A Cow Kicked Over a Lamp and Burned Down an Entire City in a Night

Ålesund's Art Nouveau streetscape exists because of a cow. On the night of 23 January 1904, a lamp overturned in a fish-oil factory on the island of Aspøya — local accounts blame a cow that kicked it — and hurricane-force winter winds turned the spark into a firestorm that consumed nearly 850 wooden buildings, almost the entire town, within hours. Only one person died, an elderly woman who went back inside her burning house for her purse, but roughly 10,000 residents were left homeless in the depths of a Norwegian winter. Kaiser Wilhelm II, a regular Ålesund vacationer, sent a telegram ordering four German warships loaded with building supplies, food, and medicine before the flames were even fully out — the relief effort that let the rebuilt city rise in stone and Jugendstil ornament within just a few years.

The wild fjord south of the city drew its own outside admirer decades earlier. English mountaineer William Cecil Slingsby began climbing in the Sunnmøre Alps in the 1870s and, after summiting Slogen above Hjørundfjord, called the view down the fjord one of the proudest in Europe — a line that helped make this then-obscure valley internationally known among climbers. Slingsby returned to Norway fifteen times over three decades and is still remembered locally as the father of Norwegian mountaineering, a title earned in a fjord that, unlike Geirangerfjord, still sees no cruise traffic at all.