Oslo

Oslo's reinvented harbourfront is the place to start. The Oslo Opera House, opened in 2008, is the city's signature building — a glacier of white marble and glass rising straight from the fjord, with a sloping roof that doubles as a public plaza you can walk up for views over the water and city (a wonderful free experience). Right beside it, the bold new Munch museum tower devotes thirteen floors to Edvard Munch, Norway's greatest artist, displaying versions of his haunting masterpiece The Scream alongside the breadth of his work, with a rooftop bar over the fjord. The angular Deichman Bjørvika library and the waterfront promenade complete a strikingly modern quarter. From here the harbour walk leads past the fortress to the western waterfront, and the fjord ferries and sightseeing boats depart from the quays nearby — the easiest way to feel Oslo's setting on the water.

Oslo punches far above its size for art. The vast new National Museum, the largest art museum in the Nordics, brings together Norway's national collection — from medieval church art and the Romantic fjord landscapes of the National Romantic painters to an earlier version of Munch's The Scream — in one purpose-built home near the harbour. But the city's best-loved art is outdoors and free: Vigeland Sculpture Park, within the larger Frognerparken, displays more than 200 sculptures in bronze and granite by Gustav Vigeland, a single artist's lifelong vision of the human condition arranged along an axis from the great fountain to the towering Monolith of intertwined figures — a uniquely moving and very popular place to wander. The Astrup Fearnley Museum on the Tjuvholmen waterfront adds international contemporary art in a Renzo Piano building, and the small Nobel Peace Center by the City Hall (where the Peace Prize is awarded) rounds out the cultural offering.

Norway's seafaring soul is told on the green Bygdøy peninsula, a short ferry or bus ride from the centre, where several museums cluster. The Viking Ship collection — preserved 9th-century burial ships, the finest in the world — is reopening in a grand new Museum of the Viking Age. Nearby, the Fram Museum houses the actual polar ship that carried Nansen and Amundsen to the ends of the earth, and the Kon-Tiki Museum displays Thor Heyerdahl's balsa raft and reed boat from his legendary ocean crossings, while the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History gathers old timber buildings including a medieval stave church. Back in the centre, the medieval Akershus Fortress still guards the harbour with ramparts, a castle and grounds free to wander, and the main boulevard Karl Johans gate runs from the central station up past the cathedral, parliament and university to the Royal Palace, where the changing of the guard takes place daily.

What sets Oslo apart is how close nature sits to the city. The Oslofjord laps the centre, and in summer public ferries run to a string of green islands — Hovedøya, Gressholmen and others — for swimming, picnics and walks just minutes from downtown, while harbour baths and the beaches of Bygdøy add to the water life. Above the city, the metro climbs to Holmenkollen, the iconic ski jump whose tower gives a sweeping view over the fjord and whose ski museum is the oldest in the world; in winter the surrounding hills are laced with floodlit cross-country trails, and in summer with hiking and biking routes. Beyond, the vast Nordmarka forest — reachable by metro — offers hundreds of kilometres of trails, lakes for swimming and rustic cabins, an enormous wilderness on the capital's doorstep. This blend of a cultured waterfront city with fjord swimming, island ferries and forest skiing all within reach is Oslo's particular magic, and it makes a natural gateway to the wider fjords of western Norway.