opulation: 8,289) was merged with the Sekken, Ve�ya, andNesjestranda part of Ve�y (population: 756), all of Bols�y municipality (population: 7,996), and the Mordal area of Nord-Aukra (population: 77) to form a new, larger Molde municipality.
Name
The city is named after the original settlement on the farmstead of Molde (Old Norse: Moldar). The name is the plural form of either mold which means "fertile soil" or moldr which means "skull" or "mold" (thus in reference to the rounded peaks in Moldemarka).
Pronunciation varies between the standard Molde and the rural Molle. A person from Molde will refer to him/herself as a Moldenser.
Coat-of-arms
The coat-of-arms was granted on 27 June 1742. It shows a whale chasing herring into a barrel, symbolizing the founding industries of the city: the export of fish and timber. Molde was never a whaling port; the image is merely a representation of the once-held belief that whales were chasing (and not following) the schools of fish into the fjords at certain times of the year.
Although the fjord outside Molde has schools of both pilot whales and orca, the whale depicted is a baleen whale, which is not found in the area
