Geirangerfjord

Where it sits. Geirangerfjorden is a 15-kilometre arm of the Sunnylvsfjord, which is itself a branch of the Storfjord, in the Sunnmøre district of Møre og Romsdal. The entire fjord lies inside Stranda Municipality, and the village of Geiranger sits at its head, where the Geirangelva river spills into salt water. Fewer than 250 people live there year-round. The rock walls climb from roughly 250 metres of water to summits between 1,400 and 1,700 metres in a horizontal distance of two or three kilometres, which is why the fjord photographs as a corridor rather than a lake. In 2005 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with the Nærøyfjord, under the joint listing West Norwegian Fjords.

How the landscape was cut. The fjord is a glacial trough drowned by the sea after the last ice sheet retreated some 11,000 years ago. Ice ground the valley below present sea level, and when the ice left, the ocean flooded it. The hanging valleys left behind are the reason the waterfalls appear to launch from mid-air: tributary glaciers cut shallower troughs that now end in cliffs. The best known are the Seven Sisters, a fan of streams on the northern wall, and the Suitor on the opposite side, with the Bridal Veil a little further along. Meltwater volume peaks in late June, which is when the falls look closest to the postcards and when the fjord water runs milky with rock flour.

The Frozen question, answered accurately. Disney's Frozen is a computer-animated film. No camera was ever set up on this fjord for it, and no scene was photographed here. What happened is that the Walt Disney Animation Studios team, led on the visual side by art director Michael Giaimo, travelled to Norway in 2012 on a research trip and came back with sketchbooks, photographs and colour studies. Fjord country supplied the geometry of Arendelle: the deep-water inlet, the mountain wall behind the town, the particular blue that low sun makes on wet granite. Geiranger and the neighbouring Sognefjord system are the landscapes most often named in that research. The kingdom itself takes its name from the southern coastal town of Arendal. The distinction matters: this is a place that was studied and referenced, not filmed.

Screen work that did happen nearby. Roughly 40 kilometres away by road and ferry, in the Valldal valley, stands the Juvet Landscape Hotel, a set of glass-walled cabins by the architects Jensen & Skodvin. Alex Garland shot the exteriors of Nathan's compound in Ex Machina there over about two weeks, blending the hotel on screen with the nearby private Fjora House by the same practice; the interiors were built at Pinewood. The hike sequence used Grønfossen waterfall in Grøndalen. Together with the fjord itself, that stretch of Sunnmøre has become one of the more heavily storyboarded corners of Norway.

What is actually there today. Geiranger village is small enough to walk end to end in twenty minutes: a church from 1842 on the hillside, a handful of hotels, the Norwegian Fjord Centre with its exhibition on avalanche risk and fjord farming. Above the village, the Flydalsjuvet overlook gives the classic downward view along the fjord. The Ørnevegen, or Eagle Road, climbs the northern side in eleven hairpins to the Ørnesvingen viewpoint. Southward, the toll road up Dalsnibba reaches a platform at 1,476 metres with a vertical view to the water. The abandoned mountain farms are the quietest attraction: Skageflå, perched about 250 metres above the fjord and reachable by boat plus a steep hour on foot, was worked until 1916. Knivsflå, on the opposite shore below the Seven Sisters, was abandoned earlier after the authorities judged the avalanche risk unacceptable, and its ruins are visible from the water. Ropes were once used to tether goats and, according to local accounts, children on the narrowest ledges.

Practicalities and timing. The fjord is reached by the county road from Åndalsnes over Trollstigen and the Eidsdal ferry, by the Strynefjell road from the south, or by the car ferry from Hellesylt, which is itself the cheapest way to sail the length of the water. Cruise calls concentrate between mid-June and mid-August and can put several thousand day visitors into a village of 250, so mornings before nine and evenings after six are a different place entirely. Norway has legislated stricter emissions rules for ships in the World Heritage fjords, which is steadily changing the traffic pattern. Winter closes Dalsnibba, Trollstigen and the Eagle Road, usually from October until May, and the village settles into a population that fits in one café. Hikers should note that the trails above the fjord gain height quickly: the walk from Homlong to Skageflå climbs several hundred metres on exposed ground and is not a stroll, and the popular Storsæterfossen path leads behind a waterfall on wet rock. The one road that stays open in winter is the tunnel route from Stranda, which makes Geiranger a genuine year-round village rather than a seasonal camp.