Despite tourist-office endeavours, OSLO retains a low profile among European cities, and even comparisons with other Scandinavian capitals are usually a little less than favourable. Inevitably, though, you'll pass through - the main train routes heading west to the fjords, north to the Arctic, south to the coast and east to Sweden are routed through the city - but take heart: Oslo is definitely worth seeing. The city has some of Europe's best museums, fields a street life that surprises most first-time visitors, and helps revive travellers weary of the austere northern wilderness.

Oslo is the oldest of the Scandinavian capital cities, founded, according to the Norse chronicler Snorre Sturlason, around 1048 by Harald Hardråde. Several decimating fires and 600 years later, Oslo upped sticks and shifted west to its present site, abandoning its old name in favour of Christiania - after the seventeenth-century Danish king Christian IV responsible for the move. The new city prospered and by the time of the break with Denmark (and union with Sweden) in 1814, Christiania - indeed Norway as a whole - was clamouring for independence, something it finally achieved in 1905, though the city didn't revert to its original name for another twenty years. Today's city centre is largely the work of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an era reflected in the wide streets, dignified parks and gardens, solid buildings and long, consciously classical vistas, which combine to lend it a self-satisfied, respectable air. Seeing the city takes - and deserves - time. Its half a million inhabitants have room to spare in a city whose vast boundaries encompass huge areas of woods, sand and water, and much of the time you're as likely to be swimming or trail-walking as strolling the city centre