Vigeland Sculpture Park

Akin to New York City’s Central Park, the immaculate Vigeland Sculpture Park is part recreational space and part open-air museum. The life’s work of Gustav Vigeland, the nearly 12-acre park represents the different stages of human life (birth, childhood, adulthood, death) with more than 200 sculptures in bronze, granite and iron. The Norwegian sculptor, who paradoxically had children of his own but no relationship with them, passed away in 1943 when the park was only 90% completed. His apprentices were able to complete the last statues with models he had created, and put the finishing touches on the park’s pièce de résistance: a monolith with 121 figures that was made from a single block of granite and weighed 240 tons before it was carved. Now, the park receives over 1 million visitors a year, some of whom are medical students, who come to study the human form that is so perfectly replicated in Vigeland’s sculptures.