Abstract. Let X be a Hausdorff topological space and CL(X) the hyperspace of all closed nonempty subsets of X. We show that the Fell topology on CL(X) is normal if and only if the space X is Lindelöf and locally compact. For the Fell topology normality, paracompactness and Lindelöfness are equivalent.Throughout the paper all spaces are assumed to be Hausdorff. By X we always denote a space, while CL(X) (resp. K(X)) is the set of all nonempty closed (compact) subsets of X. We quote [En] To describe this topology, we need to introduce some notation. For E a subset of X, we associate the following subsets of CL(X):The Fell topology τ F on CL(X) has as a subbase all sets of the form V − , where V is an open subset of X plus all sets of the form (K c ) + , where K ∈ K(X) and K c is the complement of K. In locally compact spaces, convergence with respect to the Fell topology is Kuratowski convergence of nets of sets.If compact subsets in the above definition are replaced by closed sets, we obtain the stronger Vietoris topology, also called the finite topology [Mi]. The normality of the Vietoris topology on CL(X) is equivalent to the compactness of X as was shown by Veličko in [Ve]. We refer also to Keesling's deep study of normality of the Vietoris topology [Ke1], [Ke2]. The regularity and Hausdorffness of the Fell topology was studied by Poppe [Po] and the complete regularity by Beer and Tamaki in [BT]. We can summarize here these results as follows: