Explore Stavanger & Rogaland by area

97°N, this is the mild, wet south, not the Arctic Norway of the midnight sun. Stavanger, Sola & the city fjords covers the city itself: Gamle Stavanger's roughly 170 white wooden houses from the 18th and 19th centuries, the colourful shops of Øvre Holmegate, Stavanger Cathedral, consecrated around 1125, the Norwegian Petroleum Museum, opened in 1999 on the harbour, and Sverd i Fjell, three bronze swords planted at Hafrsfjord in 1983 to mark the battle fought there in 872.

Lysefjord, Preikestolen & Kjeragbolten groups the fjord itself — around 42 km long, with walls over 1,000 m in places — with its two defining hikes: Preikestolen, a 604 m plateau with no safety railing, and Kjeragbolten, a boulder wedged at around 984 m and reached past three chained sections, plus Flørli's 4,444-step staircase, the longest wooden staircase in the world. Sandnes, Jæren & the North Sea beaches covers the long sandy coastline at Orre, Borestranden and Kvassheim, which looks nothing like the fjord country further north.

Ryfylke, Frafjord & the inner fjords is built around the 92 m Månafossen waterfall and the Ryfylketunnelen, a subsea road tunnel opened in 2019 that reaches nearly 292 m below sea level. Haugesund, Karmøy & the Viking coast covers Avaldsnes and the Viking history around Karmøy island, and Egersund, Flekkefjord & the Dalane coast closes the hub with the fishing towns of the south. The road to Kjerag, via Lysebotn, closes each winter with the snow, which shapes when several of these regions are realistically reachable — each destination page below sets out what's actually there rather than a generic description of "Norway".