An illustration of the Salmon Eye visitor centre. An opening date will be announced soon. Image: Salmon Eye.

Opening in the blink of a Salmon Eye

A daringly designed salmon farming exhibition centre in Norway is now in the final phase of development, and an opening date will soon be announced.

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The Salmon Eye will be connected to salmon farmer Eide Fjordbruk’s locality Hågardsneset, which is located just outside Snilstveitøy and Rosendal in Kvinnherad municipality, southwest Norway.

Sebastian Torjusen was employed as general manager in Salmon Eye in October 2020 and has since followed the road from drawing board to realisation closely.

Sebastian Torjusen: "The steelwork is finished, and we are working on the interior."

Steelwork finished

“We have played our cards quite close to our chest all the way and have not yet set an opening date. But soon we will be ready to go out with the date for opening the facility. The steelwork is finished, and we are working on the interior, so we are really getting closer now,” Torjusen told local newspaper Grenda.

Ever since Eide Fjordbruk revealed pictures of the eye-catching visitor centre design, it has attracted great interest.

Will look as planned

“It is a project with a long history, and we notice that there is an enormous interest in both the building and the concept,” said Torjusen.

“We communicated the early visualisation of the centre, which is unlike anything that has seen before. And people may have thought and still believe that it will not look like this, but I can confirm that it will be as we have visualised.”

The Salmon Eye is a work of art by itself, but it is what happens at the display facility that is most important.

Visitors will be taken to the Salmon Eye by boat.

Increase knowledge

“The Salmon Eye is a display system with a three-part vision. We want to inspire, help increase knowledge and provide good experiences for those who visit Salmon Eye. But it is the learning experience itself that is most important,” said Torjusen.

“The subject content is not about Eide Fjordbruk production. We have a professional panel consisting of good people from, among others, Statistics Norway / NHH, the Institute of Marine Research, the Norwegian Food Safety Authority and the University of Bergen, who will create a balance in the content we will provide to our visitors.”

Rewarding and difficult

Since Salmon Eye is a unique project, Torjusen has had to go down many new paths to land on the best solutions for the project.

“It has been both very nice and very demanding. This is a project that no one has done before. No one has seen anything similar before, so we have to do many things for the first time. It is both rewarding and difficult. But I am sure that it will give us a cool result that we and hopefully the audience will be satisfied with.”