Lillehammer

The town began in 1827 as part of Fåberg parish and grew into a close-packed run of late nineteenth-century wooden houses, set where the ground falls away towards the northern end of Lake Mjøsa and the river Lågen with mountains on every side. That setting is what the 1994 Winter Olympics were sold on, and the 2016 Winter Youth Olympics returned for the same reason. The town sits in Gudbrandsdal with its own uplands behind it (Fåberg Vestfjell and Østfjell, and Nordseter above) so it works as a base as much as a destination in its own right.