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Every year for the last many-many thousands of years, cod migrates into a fjord in Norway – Borgundfjord – to spawn. Cod is a very discerning fish, and will only do it when the conditions of temperature and salinity are just perfect, which puts them frequently on a very narrow band of deep water. This migration, which happens in the middle of Winter – typically between the first days of February and the late days of March – has been forever shaping the habits of local Norwegians, who take out their boats to fill up their – nowadays – freezers.

To visualize where this happens, you should draw a line at 62ºN latitude and scrutinize what you’ll  find. Salmon, bear, some Inuit, a few Canadians and Russians, and, of course, these Norwegians that fish for this cod in sight of this town of Ålesund. It’s a beautiful, rough and potentially lethal, landscape+seascape. 

The first records of cod-fishing in Ålesund are prehistoric; Vikings chose homesteads based on “best-conditions-for-survival”, and in the absence of large swathes of fertile land, protein fields like these fishing grounds protected from the wrath of the Norwegian Sea were privileged. Rollo, one of the most illustrious Vikings –  the first of a long generation of noblemen who ruled Normandy – was born in Giske, at the distance of a three minute seagull flight from Ålesund.  

Ålesund is, nowadays, a modern and sophisticated Norwegian city that spreads over a string of islands interconnected via undersea tunnels. It is known across the planet as the gateway to the Sunnmøre Alps and Fjords, and through some dramatic idiosyncrasies of its history became one of the most recognizable representatives of Jugendstil, or Art Nouveau, architecture. Most salted dried cod sold across the world comes from Ålesund.