The National Museum, Oslo City Hall and Nobel Peace Center

Where the grand central boulevard merges toward the western harbour at Rådhusplassen (City Hall Square), a broad car-free esplanade brings together Norway's premier museum of art and design, the monumental civic hall where the Nobel Peace Prize is handed out each December, and the museum dedicated to the laureates themselves.

The National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet): start on the 2nd floor

Opened in June 2022 after merging the former National Gallery, the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, and the Museum of Contemporary Art under one roof, the National Museum is the largest art museum in the Nordic countries, displaying over 6,500 works across 86 rooms inside a quiet slate-clad building topped by a glowing translucent marble hall called the Light Hall (Lyshallen). Because covering both giant floors in depth takes four hours, plan your route strategically:

• The Munch Room (Room 61, 2nd Floor): unlike MUNCH in Bjørvika (which holds the artist's personal bequest), the National Museum holds the earliest, most famous 1893 painted tempera-and-crayon version of Edvard Munch's The Scream (complete with the tiny pencil inscription in the upper corner reading "Could only have been painted by a madman"), displayed permanently on the wall alongside his early masterpieces The Sick Child, Madonna and Girls on the Pier.
• 19th-Century Norwegian Landscape and Fairy-Tale Art (2nd Floor): stand before Johan Christian Dahl's dramatic mountain storms, Harald Sohlberg's luminous blue Winter Night in the Mountains, and Theodor Kittelsen's haunting illustrations of Norwegian forest trolls.
• Design, Royal Gowns and Baldishol Tapestry (1st Floor): traces nearly a thousand years of decorative arts from the 12th-century Romanesque Baldishol Tapestry and medieval silver up to Scandinavian mid-century furniture and the modern royal wardrobes of Queen Maud and Queen Sonja.

Oslo City Hall (Rådhuset) and the Nobel Peace Center

Dominating the square with its twin 60-metre red-brick towers and 49-bell carillon is Oslo City Hall, inaugurated in 1950. Entry is completely free (subject to occasional civic closures): step into the vast marble Main Hall, where Europe's largest oil painting by Henrik Sørensen and sweeping frescoes by Alf Rolfsen depict Norwegian daily life, labour, the 1940s Nazi occupation and resistance. This is the exact hall where the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony takes place every 10 December (the only Nobel Prize awarded in Oslo rather than Stockholm, per Alfred Nobel's will). Across the tram tracks in the 1872 former Vestbanen railway station sits the Nobel Peace Center, where interactive installations and a glowing field of a thousand fibre-optic lights honour every Peace Prize laureate since 1901.