Qualla: Sørfold Municipality

Sørfold Municipality: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ximonic, Simo Räsänen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sørfold covers 1,637 square kilometres and holds fewer than 1,900 people. Of that land, 141 square kilometres are permanent ice and snow, and only about 266 square kilometres — roughly one part in six — lie below the 150-metre contour. In 1987 the municipality counted just 3.2 square kilometres under active cultivation. The rest is rock, ice, fjord and forest, threaded with 249 kilometres of coastline and something close to twenty named lakes. This is a place, 120 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, where the usable ground has to be looked for.

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Image: Ximonic, Simo Räsänen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sørfold Municipality: Two Arms of a Word Nobody Can Translate

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frankemann, CC BY-SA 4.0. The fjord came first, and the fjord is called Folda. Its inner reach splits into two arms — Nordfolda to the north, Sørfolda to the south — and the southern one gave the municipality its name when the old Folden Municipality was cut in half on 1 January 1887, leaving 1,946 people...

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Image: Frankemann | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sørfold Municipality: A Turbine on a Blue Field

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hesse1309, CC BY-SA 3.0. Most Norwegian municipalities put a ship or a saint or a stag on their arms. Sørfold, granted its coat of arms on 24 April 1987, chose a white turbine wheel on a blue ground — a design by Arvid Sveen of Vadsø, meant to stand for rivers full of rapids and waterfalls and for the mo...

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Image: Hesse1309 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sørfold Municipality: The Railway That Was Never Finished

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thor-Rune Hansen, CC BY-SA 3.0. About five kilometres north of the little village of Mørsvikbotn, near the lake Mørsvikvatnet, the German army ran a prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. The prisoners held there — mostly men taken on the Eastern Front — were put to work building the Polarbanen, a ra...

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Image: Thor-Rune Hansen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sørfold Municipality: Whatever the Ice Left

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rachproglieriev, CC BY-SA 3.0. The high point of the municipality is Skagmatoppen, 1,663.6 metres, but height is not really the story here — the story is how little flat land the glaciers bothered to leave. Farms went in wherever a delta or a terrace offered a few hectares, and one of them, Kjelvik, survives a...

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Image: Rachproglieriev | CC BY-SA 3.0