Sørenga & Medieval Oslo

The original city of Oslo is buried here. When a catastrophic fire destroyed the medieval city in 1624, King Christian IV forced the entire population to relocate to a new town he modestly named Christiania — present-day central Oslo. The original city was literally abandoned, buried under fields, roads, and eventually railway tracks, and forgotten for centuries. You're standing on top of it.

Adjacent to Sørenga lies Middelalderparken, opened in 2000, where excavated ruins of the original medieval city are now exposed. The remains of St. Clement's Church, built around 1100, sit here — and beneath it, archaeologists found over eighty burials carbon-dated to 980 AD, believed to be among the oldest Christian burials in Norway. The ruins of St. Mary's Church reveal fourteenth-century Gothic additions and two large towers. During excavations, the remains of King Haakon V and his Queen Euphemia of Rügen were discovered. Development in the area is now legally prohibited due to the cultural layers above and below ground.

Modern Sørenga was a container dock until Oslo's "Fjord City" vision — one of Europe's most ambitious harbor regeneration projects — transformed it into a residential neighborhood. The Sørenga Seawater Pool, opened in June 2015, is a 190-meter-long public swimming area built from sustainable Kebony wood. Year-round cold-water swimming and sauna have become wildly popular.

The view from Sørenga's pier takes in the Opera House gleaming across the harbor, the Barcode towers behind it, and the fjord stretching south. You're looking at three ages of Oslo simultaneously: medieval ruins underfoot, the industrial harbor that replaced them, and the twenty-first-century waterfront rising around you. Few cities let you stand in the present and see a thousand years in every direction.