From the sea, the tilted wooden warehouses lining Bergen's harbor give it the look of an old fishing village. Fishermen have been casting from its quays for over 900 years — and its harbor is still so clean that you can eat what you pull from it. But these days the fjords around Norway's second city are plowed in a much more futuristic way. Most of the salmon and trout in Bergen's renowned Torget fish market is farmed, not fished. Norway is Europe's top aquaculture producer and the world's largest source of farmed Atlantic salmon, exporting about $1.2 billion worth of farmed fish last year. Of the approximately 507,000 tons of farmed salmon served up, a fifth came from around Bergen (pop. 220,000).

Given the city's history of maritime trade and study — even the Norwegian Museum of Fisheries is 112 years old — Bergen's transformation into a center of aquaculture is no surprise. The Institute of Marine Research (IMR), the second largest in Europe, traces its roots back 100 years. Today it has been joined by a phalanx of other academic institutions researching everything from marine life to better fish food. "We have everything here," says IMR research director Ole Misund. Geography and economics have helped, too. The sheltered coastal waters provide ideal farming conditions, and Bergen has always been Norway's gateway to Europe, its main seafood export market. "We are moving from an emphasis on production to focusing on the consumer and opening new markets," says Ole-Eirik Lerøy, head of Lerøy Seafood, Norway's largest seafood-export firm.

But the boom in Bergen's aquaculture industry has been challenged by overproduction and falling prices, along with concerns about environmental and food safety (a study early this year found that some farmed salmon contains potentially harmful organic contaminants). Local wildlife manager Atle Kambestad says disease from the farms and interbreeding have endangered wild salmon stocks. But he also notes that, thanks to improved technology and practices, salmon lice infections in the area have been rolled to 1994 levels and fewer farmed fish are escaping into the wild.

Buyers and browsers at the bustling Torget market certainly seem sanguine about the quality of the fish on display. Tangy sweet-sour Bergenfish soup, the local specialty, is dished up in steaming bowls, brimming with fish fresh off the farms. "The market is our tradition and our history," says Lerøy. "I'm lucky to have been born and raised here."