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Islands / Fredrikstad / Hankø
Well-known sailing island in Fredrikstad, about 4 km². It has a sailing centre with regattas in June and July, the Hankø Fjordhotell, and Bloksberg, the royal family's former holiday property. Bronze Age burial cairns and traces of a German radar station from the Second World War, plus a fallow deer herd of its own.
Hankø is the long, pine-covered island on the west side of Hankøsundet, around 4 km², with white houses between the hills and a forest of masts in the harbour. The large building facing the sound is Hankø Fjordhotell. From mid-channel, with Vikane on the mainland side behind you, the whole island lies across the view. Save this one for a slow pass, because the sound is narrow and busy through the summer.
Ferry or boat across Hankøsundet (no mainland connection).
Boats do run here, but the quay is not in Entur’s system — usually a summer service or a private crossing that never enters the national journey planner. Check with the operator before you build a day around it.
People have been on Hankø for a long time. Seven Bronze Age cairns lie on the hilltops, from 1500 to 500 BC, each with a stone-built burial chamber at the centre. A map from 1776 shows two settlements: Apalviken in the north and Hankøhavna, marked "Hankø Plads". Two families lived here in 1801, and three families, 18 people in all, in 1865.
The turning point came in 1873, when six Bjørneby brothers from Solør, together with their relative Ole Bredesen Opset, bought the property. On the flat ground where the hotel now stands they found sulphurous mud that was credited with healing powers, and in 1877 Hankø Bad og Kystsanatorium opened, the forerunner of today's Hankø Fjordhotell & Spa. The island became a fashionable bathing resort, and old postcards from its best years even carried the name "Trouville", after the French seaside town.
Hankø went on to become Norway's leading sailing island. The regattas are held in June and July, and the island has hosted world championships in several boat classes. On the south side lay Bloksberg, the royal family's property, owned by Princess Märtha Louise and Ari Behn, where their daughter Leah Isadora Behn was born in 2005.
During the Second World War the Germans built a radar station on the island under the cover name Heinbuche, with Wassermann and Freya radars and a Würzburg-Riese tracking radar (FuMo 214). Traces of it are still in the terrain.
Hankø lives off cabin life, sailing and the hotel. The Fjordhotell and its spa are open all year, and the harbour fills with sailing boats during the regatta weeks. There is no connection to the mainland, so everything crosses the sound. A herd of around 100 fallow deer grazes freely in the forest, and they are easy enough to spot from the boat when they come down to the shoreline.
No road to the mainland; the crossing is by boat over Hankøsundet. The hotel and the cabin owners use boat shuttles and their own moorings. The sound is narrow and heavily trafficked in season, so keep the speed down and give sailing boats plenty of room, particularly during regattas. Guest harbour and moorings belong to the hotel and the sailing club. No access restriction is registered in the water here. The cairns on the hilltops are automatically protected monuments, so stay off them.
Hankø went from three poor crofts to Norway's best-known sailing island in under a hundred years, and it started with someone finding healing mud on the shore in the 1870s.
The roughly 100 fallow deer on the island are a population of their own, living isolated on an island with no land connection.
The German radar station was called Heinbuche and had a Würzburg-Riese, the same type of large dish radar that ran German air warning along the coast.
Bloksberg on the southern tip, where Leah Isadora Behn was born in 2005, was the royal family's base on the island.
Oslo Sea Experience passes Hankø on its private fjord trips from Tjuvholmen.
The Norwegian version notes which facts were taken from each source: Hankø på norsk.