Photo: Bjoertvedt·CC BY-SA 3.0· Wikimedia Commons
Islands / Frogn / Lågøya
The island runs about nine hundred metres, lies in Frogn and holds 21 cabins, a tennis court and a boathouse. For a hundred years it belonged to an oil company and was kept for its staff. Since 2023 anyone can rent a bed there.
Around 1920 Norsk Brændselolje bought the island to build an oil depot on it. The depot ended up elsewhere, on the mainland at Fagerstrand, and Lågøya became a holiday place for the staff instead. It stayed one through every change of name: Norsk Brændselolje became Norol, which became Statoil, which became Circle K.
The cabins, the tennis court and the boathouse arrived gradually over the company years. Who built what, and when, is not recorded in any source we have found. Nor is there an account anywhere of the island before the oil company. Every telling of it begins with the purchase.
In the spring of 2022 Circle K sold the island to Sparebankstiftelsen DNB, the savings bank foundation, for 130 million kroner. The island’s own site describes the purchase as probably the largest privately funded conservation deal in Norwegian history. For comparison, the state granted 30 million kroner that same year for buying outdoor recreation land across the whole country.
Handover was set for around 1 July of the same year. The purpose was to open a piece of the inner Oslo fjord that had been out of reach, in an area where the pressure on the shoreline is heavy.
Lågøya has a quay of its own on scheduled boat B21, the long route from Aker brygge to Son that calls at the islands on the way. From Oslo it takes barely an hour, and departures are few. The nearest mainland point is Fagerstrand on Nesodden, five minutes away in your own boat, with free parking at the boat club. The guest harbour on the east side takes day visitors for up to twelve hours, but sleeping aboard there is not allowed.
The 21 cabins hold 123 beds between them and are managed by DNT Oslo og Omegn together with Oslofjordens Friluftsråd, under the name Sameiet Lågøya. Oslofjordens Friluftsråd puts it plainly on its own site: there are neither DNT cabins nor coastal trail cabins here, only Lågøya cabins. Booking sits at lagoya.no, and you will not find them in the coastal trail listing.
The cabins are plain. None of them has electricity or running water, and the standard is rainwater in a tank, an outdoor privy, a solar panel, a gas ring and a wood stove. You can stay up to seven nights at a time.
Search for Lågøya and you will land on an uninhabited island north of Nordaustlandet on Svalbard, 103.5 square kilometres in size. It has nothing to do with this one. Both Wikipedia and Store norske leksikon describe the Svalbard island under this name.
The area is given as 130 dekar (13 hectares) by the island’s own site and by Oslofjordens Friluftsråd, while one business publication writes 118. We use the first. A comment on Frogn municipality’s land-use plan also mentions a 40-year lease between DNT and Sparebankstiftelsen, which does not square with the press releases about an outright purchase. That detail stands unconfirmed.
Last reviewed July 2026. Prices and season sit with the operator.