Hagensborg Travel Guide

Welcome to Hagensborg, BC, British Columbia

Located on Highway 20 in the Great Bear Rainforest, Hagensborg was permanently settled in 1894 by Norwegian settlers from Minnesota who reckoned the landscape to be remarkably similar to that of their homeland. Preserved since then, the Norwegian Heritage House was built by one of Hagensborg's very first residents, Andrew Svisdahl, and is a time capsule of the past, furnished in traditional fashion and displaying the household tools of a century ago. The Bella Coola River flows through the town, cutting fjords and valleycreated from the melting caps of the surrounding Coast Mountains slopes of their fjords and valleys. The river's shores were once dotted with First Nations villages, and several pictographs of unknown age carefully carved by the various early residents of the Great Bear Rainforest mark the rocks alongside Thorsen Creek, 8 km west of Hagensborg (5 mi). Highway 20 follows what was an established trade route between interior and coastal groups, traced by the Alexander MacKenzie Heritage Trail, the first European to travel the route in its entirety.