Aurland
9 villages
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Norway’s smallest stave church stands here, in a village where the goats have long outnumbered the people.
Eight centuries of goats and God
Undredal is best known for two things: its stave church, said to date to around 1147 and among the smallest in all of Scandinavia, seating barely forty; and its geitost — the brown, caramel-sweet goat cheese that has been made here for centuries and is still produced by local farms today.
Before the road through the Nærøydalen was completed in the mid-twentieth century, Undredal was reachable only by boat, and its several hundred goats were as central to daily life as any human neighbor. The tiny church, tucked among the farmhouses just above the fjord, served this isolated community for nearly eight centuries before Bakka’s larger church was finally built to serve the wider parish.
Today the village keeps its old rhythm — goats on the hillside, cheese in the dairy, and a white wooden church small enough to miss if you’re not looking for it.