Stavanger

The city dates its founding to 1125, the year the cathedral was finished, and its core is still largely eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wooden houses, protected as heritage. That has kept an oddly small-town feel in the middle of Norway’s third-largest urban area, with a high proportion of detached houses and most of the growth pushed out to the edges. Oil changed everything in the late twentieth century: this is the country’s oil capital, home to Equinor, the largest company in the Nordic region, and 22.1 per cent of the population has an immigrant background. The maritime climate keeps winters mostly above freezing.