Gamvik museum

About the museum

Gamvik Museum 71° N was established in 1978 by Gamvik Museums- og historielag (Gamvik Museum and Local History Society). Local residents collected photographs and objects, which became the basis of the collections. The museum is housed in the former Brodtkorb plant, a fish-processing works that had closed down. The buildings were restored and adapted for museum use in the years 1990–1995, and in 1998 the museum moved out of its former premises at Gamvik school.

The Brodtkorb family ran trade in Vardø from around 1800 and later opened branches along the coast of Finnmark. In Gamvik they had a shop and two fish plants, and the settlement was founded around 1840. The fishermen were often dependent on the merchant who owned the fishing station. They bought goods on credit outside the season and had to sell their catch to him at prices he set himself. German troops burned the village in autumn 1944, and today's buildings were erected between about 1946 and 1957. Here stockfish (tørrfisk), salted fish, cod liver oil and fresh fish on ice were produced, and the plant closed in 1969 when the market for stockfish collapsed.

The municipality bought the complex in the mid-1980s. The permanent exhibition “Fra fiskebruk til museum” (From Fish Plant to Museum) tells, among other things, the story of the buildings themselves as one of the few well-preserved fish plants in Finnmark from the reconstruction period. Since the museum reform in 2006, Gamvik Museum has been a branch of Museene for kystkultur og gjenreisning i Finnmark IKS (Museums for Coastal Culture and Reconstruction in Finnmark), and the museum also runs Slettnes Lighthouse station.

Highlights

• Preserved fish plant from the reconstruction period after 1945
• Permanent exhibition “Fra fiskebruk til museum” (From Fish Plant to Museum)
• The story of the Brodtkorb family and the merchant power on the coast
• Slettnes Lighthouse station, run as part of the museum
• Museum at 71° North

Permanent exhibition

• Fra fiskebruk til museum – Permanent exhibition in the former Brodtkorb plant on the running of the fish plant, merchant power and reconstruction, and on the buildings' path from industry to museum.

Founded

1978

Operated by

Museene for kystkultur og gjenreisning i Finnmark IKS

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