Holmenkollen Ski Jump

This ski jump has been rebuilt eighteen times. The first competition was held here in 1892, and Norwegians have been tearing down and rebuilding the structure ever since in an endless pursuit of bigger, steeper, faster. The current version — a swooping steel sculpture that looks like it was designed by an alien civilization — was completed for the 2011 FIS Nordic World Ski Championships. It's made of a thousand tons of steel and is the only ski jump in the world built entirely from the stuff.

The 1952 Oslo Winter Olympics put Holmenkollen on the global map. The big hill ski jumping event drew 120,000 spectators — an attendance record that still stands as the largest crowd ever at a ski jumping event. Picture that: a hundred and twenty thousand people packed onto a Norwegian hillside in February to watch men fly off a ramp. That's more people than most Super Bowls. Norwegians take their ski jumping seriously.

The hill record is 144 meters, set by Robert Johansson of Norway in 2019. For those of us who'd rather not launch ourselves into the void, there's a 361-meter zipline with a 107.5-meter vertical drop, an observation deck accessible by elevator, and a ski jump simulator. Below the jump sits the world's oldest skiing museum, founded in 1923, covering four thousand years of Norwegian skiing history — because Norwegians were strapping planks to their feet and sliding down mountains long before anyone thought to make it a sport.

Getting here is half the experience. Take the T-bane metro line 1 from central Oslo to Holmenkollen station — it's one of the most scenic urban metro rides in Europe, climbing through birch forests above the city. At 371 meters above sea level, the view from the top takes in all of Oslo and the fjord beyond.