The town of Mo i Rana stands about halfway up Norway's long eastern coast, 73 miles north of Bergen and 264 miles south of Narvik. It's just 5 miles south of the Arctic Circle at the head of Ran Fjord in the Helgeland region. Visitors who hire a car in Mo i Rana soon find that the main E6 highway runs through the town, where it joins the E12 that heads west to Sweden just 15 miles away. The Mo i Rana airport is six miles to the north of the city and the mainline railway also passes through. Mo i Rana serves as an excellent hub for adventures into the surrounding landscape of mountains, valleys and national parks.
Locals just call it 'Mo' and if you hire a car here in Mo i Rana you can fully explore what there is to see. To start with, the River Ranelva and fjord provide fishing opportunities and the Saltfjellet Mountains provide caves that can be visited. There's a large industrial park in Mo including a steel works but there are tourist attractions too, including the Rana Museum of local history, a Natural History Museum, the National Library of Norway and a striking granite figure sculpture by British artist Antony Gormley that stands in the water of the fjord.
