Kjeåsen is a mountain farm (with two farmsteads) in the municipality of

Eidfjord Eidfjord is a List of municipalities of Norway, municipality in Vestland county, Norway. The municipality is located in the Districts of Norway, traditional district of Hardanger. The administrative centre of the municipality is the village of E ...

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard also form part of the Kingdom of ...

Hardanger Hardanger is a traditional district in the western part of Norway, dominated by the Hardangerfjord and its inner branches of the Sørfjorden and the Eid Fjord. It consists of the municipalities of Ullensvang, Eidfjord, Ulvik and Kvam, and is ...

district, in

Vestland Vestland is a Counties of Norway, county in Norway. The county is located in Western Norway, and its administrative centre is Bergen, where the executive and political leadership is based. The County governor (Norway), County Governor is based in ...

county. The farm lies at an elevation of at the innermost point of the Simadal Fjord. The farm is no longer being worked, and one person lives there during the summer. The site is popular with tourists, especially Swedes. The farm has been referred to as "the world's most inaccessible farm." Kjeåsen can be reached on foot up the steep path from the

Sima Hydroelectric Power Station The Sima Power Station is a hydroelectric power station located in the municipality Eidfjord in Vestland, Norway. It stands at the mouth of the Sima River. The facility Lang-Sima operates at an installed capacity of , and has an average annual p ...

. This was the farm's road until 1974, and the trip takes about 1½ to 2 hours each way. Kjeåsen also has what is known as "the world's most expensive farm road"; it is long, of which approximately consists of a

tunnel A tunnel is an underground or undersea passageway. It is dug through surrounding soil, earth or rock, or laid under water, and is usually completely enclosed except for the two portals common at each end, though there may be access and ve ...

from the Sima Valley to the farm. The tunnel has a single lane, with driving directions scheduled up on the hour and down every half hour. The road and tunnel to Kjeåsen were built in 1974 in connection with hydroelectric development works in the Sima Valley. The tunnel has now been outfitted with lights. Walking and cycling are not permitted in the tunnel. The name ''Kjeåsen'' comes from ''kje'' ' kid' and ''ås'' 'hill', inflected for

definiteness In linguistics, definiteness is a semantic feature of noun phrases that distinguishes between referents or senses that are identifiable in a given context (definite noun phrases) and those that are not (indefinite noun phrases). The prototypical ...

. The farm has been inhabited at least since the 1650s. Until the road up to the farm was built, all transport took place on the steep path from the bottom of the fjord. In the 1930s a cable car was built that could carry food and other material up to the farm. However, the residents of Kjeåsen still had to use the trail as before. The outlying farmstead at Kjeåsen was vacated in 1962, and since 2010 the other farmstead has been inhabited only in the summer. The outlying farmstead was sold in 2016 after several hundred years in the same family. The Swedish author Bror Ekström visited Kjeåsen in the 1950s and wrote a book about the people living there. His work, ''Folket på Kieåsen'' (The People of Kjeåsen), was first published in 1958 and became very popular. In Norway, Halldor O. Opedal published ''Kjeåsfolket i Hardanger. Soga om eit utkantfolk'' (The People of Kjeåsen in Hardanger. The Story of an Unknown People) in 1980. In 2001, Reinhard Kungel made a film for the German broadcaster ARD about the last mountain farmers in Norway. In Kjeåsen, he portrayed the last inhabitant, Bjorg Wiik. The Norwegian broadcasting company

NRK The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (), commonly known by its initialism NRK, is a Norwegian state-run, government-influenced radio and television public broadcasting company. The NRK broadcasts three national TV channels and thirteen nat ...

aired a program about Kjeåsen in its series ''Der ingen skulle tru at nokon kunne bu'' (Where No One Would Think Anyone Could Live) in 2002.

Sveriges Radio Sveriges Radio Aktiebolag, AB (; "Sweden's Radio") is Sweden's national publicly funded radio programming, radio broadcaster. Sveriges Radio is a public limited company, owned by an independent foundation, previously funded through a television ...

, the Swedish national radio broadcaster, has also aired a program about the farm.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kjeasen Farms in Vestland Eidfjord