Vigeland Sculpture Park, the Monolith and Frogner District

Located three kilometres north-west of the city centre and reached in ten minutes on Tram 12 (to Vigelandsalléen stop) or the T-bane metro to Majorstuen, Vigeland Park (Vigelandsanlegget) sits inside the 45-hectare green expanse of Frogner Park. It is the largest sculpture park in the world created by a single artist, and remarkably it has no gates and no admission charge, remaining open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In the 1920s, sculptor Gustav Vigeland (1869 to 1943) struck an extraordinary deal with the Municipality of Oslo: in exchange for the city building him a studio and living quarters at the southern edge of the park, he donated every sculpture, drawing, woodcut and plaster model he ever created to the public.

Walking the 850-Metre Sculpture Axis

Vigeland designed both the architectural layout of lawns, bridges and staircases and all 212 bronze, granite and wrought-iron sculptures (totalling more than 600 individual human figures), all depicted completely nude so they would remain timeless and universal across the human life cycle from birth to old age. Enter through the wrought-iron Main Gate on Kirkeveien and follow the axis west:

1. The Bridge (Broen): lined along its granite parapets with 58 bronze figures of men, women and children in moments of joy, play and struggle. Halfway along on the left-hand side stands Oslo's most famous small statue, Sinnataggen (The Angry Boy), stamping his foot and clenching his fists (his left hand shines bright gold from millions of visitors touching it).
2. The Fountain (Fontenen): six bronze giants hold up a vast square water basin, surrounded by twenty bronze tree clumps depicting the stages of life from infancy in the branches to skeletons returning to nature.
3. The Monolith Plateau (Monolitten): at the highest point of the park rises a 14.1-metre column carved from a single 260-tonne block of Iddefjord granite. Three stone carvers worked for fourteen years (1929 to 1943) from Vigeland's full-scale plaster model to chisel 121 intertwined human figures reaching upward toward the sky, surrounded on the circular steps by 36 granite family groups.
4. The Wheel of Life (Livshjulet): a rotating ring of four adults and three children terminating the western axis.

The Vigeland Museum and Strolling Frogner

Do not miss the red-brick neoclassical Vigeland Museum just outside the southern edge of the park on Nobels gate, which preserves Vigeland's soaring plaster-cast workshops and third-floor apartment. Afterwards, walk down Bygdøy allé or Skovveien through Frogner, Oslo's grand late-19th-century residential quarter of pastel stucco apartment buildings, antique shops and quiet French-style bakeries.