The most photographed village in Norway — rorbuer fishing cabins on stilts, the Reinebringen ridge walk that looks straight down at the archipelago, and the midnight sun reflecting in Reinefjord
Reine is a small fishing village on the island of Moskenesøya in the Lofoten Islands archipelago — population 300, built on a series of small islands connected by bridges, the village of red and white rorbuer (traditional fishermens' cabins, now converted to rental accommodation) reflecting in the still water of Reinefjord with the jagged granite peaks of the Lofoten Wall (the mountain wall that runs the 160km length of the archipelago, rising precipitously from the sea to 1,000m without foothills — one of the most dramatic coastal mountain formations in the world) rising directly from the vi…
The Lofoten Islands have been inhabited since the last ice age (10,000 BCE), with Viking-age longhouse settlements (the Lofotr Viking Museum at Borg, 170km from Reine, excavated the largest Viking longhouse discovered in Norway). Reine's modern identity is defined by the skrei cod fishery (the Arctic cod spawning migration that fills the Vestfjord between Lofoten and the Norwegian mainland from January to April each year — the largest wild cod spawning migration in the Atlantic) and by the traditional Norwegian fishing cabin industry that transitioned to tourism after the collapse of the Lofo…