Bolstadøyri is a small village of around 230 people where the Vosso river meets the Bolstadfjord. The name comes from Old Norse - "Bolstad" from bólstaðr meaning farmstead or dwelling, and "øyri" meaning sandbank or gravel spit by the water. You'll see this "-øyri" ending in other fjord villages like Aurlandsøyri and Lærdalsøyri - it marks where rivers deposit sediment as they meet the fjord.
This is where freshwater becomes saltwater. The Vosso river drains nearly 1,500 square kilometres of mountain and valley, flowing through Voss, through lake Evangervatnet, then past Evanger before reaching here. The freshwater stays largely in the upper layers of the Bolstadfjord - measurements show the brackish layer is only about 5 metres deep in spring, expanding to 20 metres by late summer.
The village was an important trading post from around 1600. The old post road between Bergen and Oslo came through here - travellers would arrive by boat across the fjord and continue overland. The guesthouse dates from the 1660s, rebuilt in Louis XVI. style in the 1830s. There's also a dragon-style building called "Slottet" (the Castle) designed by Magnus Dagestad, and a small raft museum by the fjord.
But the real story here is the salmon. The Vosso salmon were legendary - the largest Atlantic salmon in the world by average weight, with fish regularly exceeding 10 kilograms and giants reaching over 36 kg. English gentlemen travelled here specifically to fish these waters. For centuries, catches averaged about 12 tonnes per year.
Then in the late 1980s, the population crashed. The fishery collapsed in 1991 and closed in 1992. The wild Vosso salmon went effectively extinct. Acid rain, hydroelectric development, escaped farm salmon diluting the gene pool, sea lice - all played their part.
What saved them was Norwegian oil wealth and foresight. Scientists had created a living gene bank at Eidfjord, keeping fish from different wild stocks in land-based tanks. The Vosso strain survived there. Since 2000, a restoration programme has been releasing native Vosso salmon back into the river. They're returning to spawn again, though the wild population is still fragile.
The old fishing huts still perch on cliffs and poles above the fjord - the sitjenot method of seine fishing dates back at least 150 years. They're mostly silent now, watching over the salmon's slow return.