Our history

The Norwegian Fisheries Museum was founded in 1880 by The Society for the Promotion of Norwegian Fisheries, under the name The Fisheries Museum in Bergen. Their goal was to modernize the industry. The Fisheries Museum is Norway's oldest museum dedicated to business and industry. 

Since then the museum has accumulated a large collection of objects and photographs, along with an extensive commercial archive and a large collection of books from the field.Since the museums foundation in the 1800s it has been an important platform to share the knowledge from Norway as a fisheries nation. However, a lot has changed along the way, both in the fisheries industy and in the museums perspective. Today, the name is The Norwegian Fisheries Museum and has been a part of Museum Vest since the museum reform in 2005. The Norwegian Fisheries Museum is, along with the Hanseatic Museum and the Coastal Museum in Øygarden, a national centre for fishing history and coastal culture. 

 he Norwegian Fisheries Museum is a rich cultural museum that has built a collection of artifacts, archives and books that surrounds what has shaped the coastal part of Norwegian and international history. In the later years the conveyance of knowledge has been an important focus, both through publications in the museum-network and directed by larger reasearch projects related to Norways history of fishing, coastal history and aquaculture history.