Reine, Norway

Where it sits. Reine is the administrative centre of Moskenes Municipality in Nordland county, on the island of Moskenesøya near the outer end of the Lofoten archipelago, well above the Arctic Circle and about 300 kilometres south-west of Tromsø. The village covers barely 0.28 square kilometres and had a population of 297 in 2023. It occupies a low spit of land inside a sheltered bay, with the granite spires of Olstinden and Reinebringen rising almost vertically behind it out of shallow, unusually pale water. The colour is not a trick of processing: the beaches here are ground shell and quartz sand, and in flat light the bay turns turquoise even at five degrees Celsius.

The fishing village it still is. Reine was granted trading rights in 1743 and grew on the winter cod fishery, when spawning skrei arrive off Lofoten between January and April. The red and ochre timber cabins standing on stilts over the water are rorbuer, seasonal quarters built for visiting fishermen; most now let to travellers, but the fishery has not stopped. Wooden drying racks, the hjell, still fill the flats around the village from February onwards, hung with split cod that air-dries into stockfish over several months. That trade is the oldest continuous export business in Norway and the reason places like Reine exist at all; a substantial share still goes to Italy and Nigeria.

On screen, precisely. Lofoten is the Norway that appears in Alexander Payne's Downsizing from 2017, where the miniaturised colony is set in a fjord landscape. The Norwegian unit worked in the archipelago and in Bergen, and the fjord sequences were shot at Trollfjord, a narrow inlet off the Raftsundet strait some distance north-east of here, rather than at Reine itself. It is worth being exact about that, because Reine's image circulates constantly and is often captioned with productions that never came near it. What Reine genuinely is, on the visual side, is one of the most photographed villages in Europe, and a fixture of tourism campaigns, stills libraries and aerial reels rather than of feature drama.

The climb everyone makes. Reinebringen, at 448 metres, gives the view that defines the place: the village, its bay and the surrounding peaks laid out below in a single frame. The old path up was a notorious mudslide that caused repeated injuries, and between 2015 and 2019 Nepalese Sherpa crews built a stone staircase of roughly 1,500 steps up the flank. It is still steep, still exposed near the top, and closed periodically for avalanche or rockfall risk in winter and spring. The round trip takes two to three hours. Lower and gentler alternatives exist: the walk to Bunes beach from Vindstad, reached by the small ferry across Kjerkfjorden, ends at a wide sand beach beneath a 700-metre rock wall.

The water off the point. South-west of Moskenesøya lies the Moskstraumen, the tidal current between the island and Værøy that gave European literature its maelstrom. Olaus Magnus described it in the sixteenth century, and Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne and Herman Melville all built on the legend. The real phenomenon is a strong tidal race generated by water forced between shallow banks, spectacular in the right combination of tide and wind and unremarkable otherwise. Boat operators from Reine and Å run trips towards it in settled weather.

What is actually there today. The village is small: a church, a school, a couple of cafés, a gallery in a converted fish factory, and the ferry quay for the Kjerkfjorden crossing. Neighbouring Sakrisøy, on the same road, has yellow-painted cabins and a fish market; Hamnøy has the bridge that provides the standard photograph of red cabins against the mountain. The E10, King Olav V's road, links them all and ends 12 kilometres further on at the village of Å, where the Norwegian Fishing Village Museum preserves a working cod-liver-oil plant. The road between these villages threads a chain of bridges and short tunnels built from the 1960s onward; before it existed, every one of these settlements was a boat community, which explains why they sit where they do rather than where a road engineer would have put them.

Getting there and timing. Leknes and Svolvær have airports with connections through Bodø; a car ferry runs Bodø to Moskenes in three to four hours, and the E10 reaches Lofoten by road from Narvik. Midnight sun runs from late May to mid-July, when the light never fully leaves and photography continues all night. The polar night lasts from early December to early January, and the northern lights are realistically visible from late September to March. Winter driving is serious, with wind rather than snow depth the main problem, and accommodation prices in the rorbuer peak in both July and the aurora months. The islands have absorbed a steep rise in visitors over the past decade, and parking, waste and access to private land around the best-known viewpoints are live local issues, so pulling off the E10 at a marked passing place rather than on a verge is more than a courtesy.