Ferries from Balestrand kai

Balestrand was one of the first places in Norway that people visited simply to look at, and its quay still shows the scale of that: 16 active sailings, spread thinly across three destinations. This is a village that receives boats rather than a junction that dispatches them.

Where the boats go

• Vik — about 16 minutes, 4 sailings.
• Leikanger — about 15 minutes, 3 sailings.
• Dragsvik — about 20 minutes, 1 sailing.

Operated by Skyss.

⚠ The car ferry is at Dragsvik, not here

Balestrand kai takes the express passenger boats. Drivers crossing the Sognefjord use Dragsvik, a few kilometres away, which feeds the Hella–Vangsnes triangle and carries 48 sailings on its busiest leg against this quay's four.

Arriving here with a car expecting to drive onto a boat does not work.

Why the village looks like this

Fjord tourism began here in the mid-nineteenth century with British anglers and then cruise traffic, and the architecture followed — carved timber in the national romantic manner, verandas facing the water, and an English church built in the 1890s for the visitors who came every summer.

It is a purpose-built Victorian resort in a fjord, and there is nothing else quite like it on this coast.

The fjord here

The Sognefjord is 205 km long and 1,308 m deep at its deepest, and Balestrand sits where the Fjærlandsfjord branches north toward the Jostedalsbreen glacier. That junction is why the boats call and why the village became what it did.

Season

Heavily seasonal. Summer brings express boats, cruise calls and the full hotel; winter reduces the village to its permanent population and the Dragsvik car ferry.