Akershus (fylke), Norway — Towns & Travel Guide

This is the ring around the capital. Akershus wraps the city of Oslo on its landward sides, the most populous county in Norway and the working heart of the Greater Oslo Region in the Østlandet south-east. Its towns are the capital's commuter belt.

Lillestrøm and Asker hold the largest of them, with Ski, Drøbak, and Jessheim spread across the lowlands, and the county takes its very name from the Akershus Fortress that stands over the harbour in Oslo. The metropolitan engine of eastern Norway.

Akershus lies in the eastern part of Norway, the Østlandet lowlands, wrapped around the city of Oslo without enclosing it. The shape is unusual, a county built as a ring, its towns and farmland curving around the capital from the fjord shore in the south up through the flatlands and forests of the south-east, so that almost everywhere in Akershus looks inward toward the city it surrounds. The land is gentle here.

This is the soft, fertile country of eastern Norway, low ridges and broad farm valleys rather than the fjords and fjell of the west, the most settled and worked ground in the country. The centre of gravity is the capital. Oslo sits in the middle of the ring as the administrative centre of Akershus, drawing the county's roads and railways inward, while the lowlands stretch out past Lillestrøm and Jessheim toward the airport on the Gardermoen flats.

The fjord defines the south. Drøbak and the southern towns line the inner waters below the capital, and the whole county reads as the rural and suburban frame around Oslo, the working hinterland of the Østlandet heartland.

Akershus shares the capital's life without being the capital. The county's culture is bound up with Oslo, which it rings and feeds, so its towns carry the rhythm of the Greater Oslo Region, half suburban and half rural, with the museums and stages of the capital always close at hand across the county line. The name itself is a history lesson.

Akershus is called after the Akershus Fortress above the Oslo harbour and ultimately after the medieval Aker farm, a thread back to the time when this was the main fief governing most of eastern Norway. Daily life leans on land and commute. Farm villages of the Østlandet lowlands keep an older agricultural Norway alive around the edges, while Lillestrøm, Asker, and the rail towns hold a modern commuter life that turns daily toward the capital.

Spoken Norwegian here is the eastern standard. Between the fjordside calm of Drøbak and the airport flats near Jessheim, Akershus reads as the broad, settled frame of the country's busiest region, drawn together by its place around Oslo.

Akershus is old as a region, modern as a county. Since the Middle Ages it has been a region of eastern Norway with Oslo as its main city, named after the Akershus Fortress that guards the capital's harbour and after the medieval Aker farm beneath it. For centuries it was the main fief governing most of eastern Norway.

The county in its present narrower form was reorganised in 1919, drawing the lowland and fjordside districts around the capital, from Lillestrøm and Jessheim to Drøbak, into the central county of the Greater Oslo Region. A medieval seat turned metropolitan ring.

Akershus has the sheltered continental climate of eastern Norway. Lying inland in the Østlandet lowlands rather than out on the western coast, the county around Oslo sees warm, light-filled summers and cold, snowy winters, with a wider swing between the seasons than the rain-soaked fjord country to the west. Winters bite here.

Snow settles across the farmland and forests from Lillestrøm out to the Gardermoen flats near Jessheim, while the inner fjord around Drøbak softens the cold a little along the southern shore of south-eastern Norway.

The county is Norway's transport crossroads. Oslo Airport sits within Akershus on the Gardermoen flatlands near Jessheim, and nearly all the railway lines and major roads to and from the capital pass straight through the county. Arrival here is almost automatic.

Most travellers reaching Oslo touch down or roll through Akershus first, then take the fast rail in to the capital, while local lines spread out to Lillestrøm, Asker, Ski, and Drøbak across the Østlandet lowlands. The hub of eastern Norway runs through this ring.