The Avid Cruiser visits Gammelstad, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that represents the best-preserved example of a "church village." Villages like Gammelstad were once found throughout northern Scandinavia. The 424 wooden houses that radiate from the early 15th-century stone church, were used only on Sundays and at religious festivals to house worshippers from the surrounding countryside who lived too far away from home to return on the same day. Gammelstad is fewer than 20 minutes by car or bus from where the cruise ships dock in Luleå.