Wikipedia
Lærdal is a municipality in the southeastern part of Sogn og Fjordane county, Norway. It is located on the south side of the Sognefjorden in the traditional district of Sogn. The administrative center of the municipality is the village of Lærdalsøyri. The area of the municipality is , half of it consists of mountain areas, the rest is valleys. The old Filefjell Kongevegen road passes through Lærdal on its way to Valdres and later to Oslo.
The Lærdal river valley is long, running from Hemsedal ( Høgeloft mountain) and the Filefjell mountains in the east to the Sognefjorden in the west. About 1,200 of the 2,200 inhabitants live in the main village of Lærdalsøyri; the rest in the small villages Borgund, Ljøsne, Tønjum, Erdal, Vindedalen, Frønningen, and Strendene. The Old Lærdalsøyri village has 161 protected buildings. Some of the houses there date back to the mid-18th century. On the night of 18–19 January 2014, a major fire destroyed at least 30 buildings.
Laerdal is a major manufacturer of medical equipment and medical training products based in Stavanger, Norway. Established in 1940 as a print shop, it soon began manufacturing popular rubber toys under the name Tomte Laerdal - the company's best-known product in the 1960s. An outgrowth of this expertise in plastics was the manufacture of medical training models and devices - the company's mainstay. Laerdal's best-known product today is a training mannequin popularly named ' CPR Annie'.