When you enter the back room of the Swan Pharmacy in Alesund you are entering a time machine.
When the door behind you, the years start rolling backward, further and further, stopping at the year 1904.
Then a door on the other side opens and you enter the night of January 23.
Church bells are chiming and the sounds of a storm are played through the loudspeakers. It's the sound that the violent winds made blowing in from the southwest that fateful night, coming from the direction where a fire in a canning plant had broken out.
Soon, the entire town was engulfed in flames. Luckily, only one person died.
That disaster is the reason that today, Alesund is one of the most beautiful cities in Norway.
"What is so special about Alesund is that the entire city was rebuilt in art nouveau style," says Ingvil Grimstad of the Art Nouveau Centre in the Swan Pharmacy.
The reconstruction was planned by Hagbarth Schytte-Berg, a star architect of the time who had studied in Germany, as had many of his colleagues who came from around Norway to Alesund to help.
Within three years, 400 new buildings had been erected in the city centre.
As cynical as it might sound, the catastrophe brought Alesund an opportunity.
"The city was rebuilt, but better and prettier," says Grimstad. The new streets were broader. And, in the wake of the fire, the government in Oslo mandated that new buildings in city centres throughout Norway had to be built of stone.
The beautifully restored buildings along the canal were all fish factories or warehouses in the old days. Today, visitors can still see the cranes above the doors that used to haul the loads of fish from the boats.
But the canal street now is home to offices, hotels and restaurants.
The best view of the city is from Mount Aksla, reached by climbing 418 steps. It offers a panorama over the city, with its canals, islands and harbours. There is the fjord and, rising majestically in the background, the snow-capped peaks of the Sunnmore Alps.
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