North Cape opens the soul with its remoteness

Arnd Petry, Deutsche Presse Agentur, North Cape, Norway

All roads end here. The cliffs drop steeply 300 meters into the sea. The only way to continue is by ship to the North Pole, 2,100 kilometers away.

The clocks here seem to tick differently. The sun seems to set on the horizon more slowly than ever. The sky seems higher than elsewhere, the people below it smaller.

The North Cape, on the Norwegian island of Mageroya, is a place to open up your soul, cast off your cares and at last recognize what is really important in life - but you are unlikely to have the solitude to do so.

Lots of people have hit upon the idea to travel to the northernmost end of Europe at least once in their lifetime.

"In 2000 we had 190,000 visitors, more than half of them from Germany," said Beate Juliussen of the tourist board in the northern Norwegian province of Finnmark.

The year 1994 saw a record number of 260,000 visitors. "Anyone who travels to this province by car, also makes the trip to the North Cape," she said.

Most tourists come for the midnight sun between May 14 and July 31, when the sun never sets. "But guests even come at New Year when it's dark," said Juliussen.

The first foreign visitors were from Britain. They were seafarers who used the clearly defined cliffs as a good navigation point.

Captain Richard Chancellor was the first to write it into the nautical charter by its current name, as he attempted to find a northeasterly sea crossing to China.

The North Cape early on became a popular tourist destination.

In 1795 the man who was later to become Louis Philippe, King of France, took a pleasure trip to the North Cape.

Kaiser Wilhelm II also traveled to the upper end of Europe, and in 1907 the King of Siam came here. In 1927 local inhabitants finally founded a society in the nearby town of Honningsvag to develop tourism.

Many visitors here believe they are at the northernmost point in Europe - but they are wrong. "The northernmost point of the European continent is at Cape Nordkyn, a few kilometers east of here," said Juliussen. "The land stretches another 1.8 kilometers further north there."

And even that is strictly speaking not the northernmost. For there is another rock, less spectacular looking than the Cape, that is a few kilometers closer to the North Pole," she said.

But these two destinations even further north do not have car parks, postcards and French fries. So if you are hungry or need the toilet, you are best off driving to "Europe's northernmost viewpoint", as the official Norwegian terminology puts it.

In 1988 a new visitor center was built. As well as restaurants and a big souvenir shop, there is a museum and a panoramic cinema screen that shows the polar light on a midsummer night to the accompaniment of dynamic music.

From the cinema, a tunnel nearly 100 meters long leads to the underground Grotto Bar, the size of a railway station building.

Here, in the tradition of the earliest royal tourists here, the sun is toasted with champagne and caviar.

After a few rounds, you might feel a little like Francesco Negri, the Italian priest who was one of the first ever tourists here in 1664. He wrote: "My thirst for knowledge is now satiated and I can return to Denmark and, God willing, to my homeland."