Norway has seen a huge spike in tourism over the last few years, particularly from the United States. Part of this is due to the fact that its fjords, some of which are UNESCO world heritage sites, attract lots of tourists who visit the region in cruise ships, and part of it is due to the success of the 2013 animated movie Frozen, which is set in an area that looks a lot like Norway.
The tiny town of Geiranger, with 215 residents, sees something like 700,000 cruise ship tourists a year. The number of people hiking the Trolltunga promontory has increased from 1,000 to 100,000 over the past five years. There are numerous other tourist sites that are seeing similarly increased traffic.
Although this seems like a good problem to have, the issue is that all this tourism is happening in a country whose ecology and people are simply not prepared for such hordes of visitors.
The influx has been so great so quickly that it’s disrupting Norwegian life and the beautiful landscapes that people go there to visit. The nation has cut its tourism promotional spending significantly, and the money it does spend is focused on “slow tourism” rather than whirlwind tours of all the most popular sites.
“We want to be a sustainable alternative to cruise tourism,” Tone Ronning, co-owner of 29/2 Aurland, a family-run farm hotel in the Sognefjord region, told Forbes. “It’s a contradiction. Once you become a World Heritage site, you get more crowds, and it becomes a lost paradise. We don’t want that to happen here.”
The idea behind slow tourism is to encourage visitors to take their time and try traditional Norwegian pastimes such as fishing or knitting. The government is also supporting sustainable inns, which give people a much more authentic Norwegian experience than big hotels and are better for the environment. Locally sourced and sustainable food is playing a big part in slow tourism, too.
In addition to slowing down and reducing travel in order to take it easy on Norway’s environment, slow tourism has the added benefit of allowing visitors to get to know the country. There’s even a show called Slow TV that just films people fishing and doing other traditional Norwegian crafts, to give viewers an idea of Norway’s cultural heritage.
“We really want guests to slow down here, understand the culture and history of the valley, meet the craftspeople who keep alive generations of traditions, and enjoy the fjords the way they used to be enjoyed—without polluting cruise ships,” Ronning said.
We’ve always said that the best way to truly see another country is to get off the beaten path and take some time to get to know life outside the tourist hot spots, and this is exactly the kind of tourism Norway hopes to get more of in the coming years.