Unstad: a farmed valley that became a surf spot

A settled place, not a wilderness

The municipality's cultural-heritage assessment treats Unstad as a closed, clearly legible landscape of farms, field divisions, boathouses and archaeological remains, of regional and national value. That is why our print makes the fields and the enclosing slopes the subject, and leaves out surfers and buildings. It is a worked landscape, not an empty one. Visit Norway's own page on surfing is careful to add that conditions here are not consistently ideal, and neither is the weather.

1963: homemade boards

The first surfers in Lofoten were two locals, Thor Frantzen and Hans Egil Krane. A University of Stavanger study of cold-water surfing in Norway records that they had seen surfing at Bondi Beach and, back home in 1963, surfed Unstad on homemade boards. The beach they had seen has its own story on this site. For a long time that was the whole story: a beach at the end of a valley, two men, and boards they had built themselves.

The 1990s and after

The same study notes that surfing at Unstad picked up again in the 1990s, that a surf film was shot on the beach in 1999, and that an annual competition, the Lofoten Masters, drew more than a hundred participants at the time the study was written; we have not checked current numbers. What began as a private experiment became the place Visit Norway describes as Lofoten's best-known surf site.

Unstad is not Norway's only farmed surf valley. Far to the south, Hoddevik on the Stad peninsula tells a different story: a road, four farms and a national-championship beach, outside the Arctic Circle.

Do you remember the early boards?

If your family was at Unstad in the 1960s and has photographs with a date, email us. We'd like to add local detail, and we'll ask before publishing anything and agree how to credit you.

Our Unstad print

Our Unstad print looks across the deep blue bay to the crescent beach and the rectangles of cultivated land, with the slopes closing the frame on both sides. No wave is drawn, because the landform is what identifies the place.