Flåm holds roughly 350 permanent residents and receives close to a million visitors a year. The imbalance defines the place. The village sits at the head of the Aurlandsfjord, a 29-kilometre arm of the Sognefjord, which at 1,308 metres is the deepest fjord in Norway and the second deepest on earth. Cruise hulls that would dwarf the entire settlement moor within a few metres of the shoreline because the water drops away so steeply. Travellers researching best shore excursions flam norway are, in effect, researching a single glacial trench and the four or five ways human engineering has learned to cross it. The Flåm Railway explains most of the village's modern fame. Construction began in 1924 and the line opened to steam traffic in 1940, electrified in 1944. Twenty kilometres of track climb 863 metres from the fjord to Myrdal at a gradient of 1:18 on eighty percent of the route, through twenty tunnels, eighteen of them cut by hand. Kjosfossen falls beside the track. The Rallarvegen navvy road runs above it. The whole descent takes about an hour and is regularly ranked among the finest rail journeys in Europe, which is why flåm utflukter — the local term for these outings — almost always include a seat on it. What gives the surrounding landscape its standing is older than any railway. The Nærøyfjord, the neighbouring branch, narrows to 250 metres between walls rising 1,700 metres, and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2005 alongside the Geirangerfjord. Undredal, a hamlet reachable only by boat until 1988, keeps a stave church built around 1147 that seats forty people and remains the smallest still in use in Scandinavia. Farther inland, the Lærdal Tunnel runs 24.5 kilometres beneath the mountains, the longest road tunnel in the world since it opened in 2000, lit in blue and yellow at intervals to break the monotony. The Stegastein viewpoint, finished in 2006, extends thirty metres of laminated pine over a 650-metre drop above the Aurlandsfjord, its glass balustrade curving down and away so nothing interrupts the sightline. Between the quay and these points lie a handful of practical routes — rail, RIB, ferry, minibus — and the best shore excursions flam norway operators run simply string them together in the hours a ship stays in port. Entry to the village and its museum costs 0 NOK; the fjord itself has never charged admission.