Longyearbyen

Tourists came before miners: in 1896 a Norwegian steamship company began summer cruises to Hotellneset and put up a prefabricated hotel, which closed after a year. The American industrialist John Munro Longyear visited as a tourist in 1901, met prospectors looking for coal, and in 1906 his Boston-based Arctic Coal Company opened Mine 1a, building docks, housing and an aerial tramway to carry coal 1.2 kilometres down to the shore. Known as Longyear City until 1926, the settlement was sold in 1916 to the Norwegian company Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani, and a coal-dust explosion in Mine 1 later killed 26 men. The first church on Svalbard opened in 1921.

In the Second World War the population was evacuated to Scotland in 1941, and on 8 September 1943 a German fleet led by the battleships Tirpitz and Scharnhorst bombarded the town and almost completely destroyed it. Rebuilding followed: Nybyen's barracks went up in 1946, the community centre Huset in 1951 and a new church in 1958. Mines opened and closed up and down the valleys, the airport arrived in 1975, and snowmobiles soon outnumbered cars.

From the 1990s the town changed character. The University Centre opened in 1993, a satellite station followed in 1999 and the Global Seed Vault in 2008, while mining moved elsewhere and tourism grew. Since 2002 the town has been governed by an elected community council. A large avalanche struck the town in 2015, and on 30 June 2025 Mine 7, the last Norwegian coal mine on Svalbard, closed.

Longyearbyen likes to count its "northernmosts": the brewery and the restaurant both claim the title, the church, whose parish takes in the whole archipelago, held it until 2017, and the town has two museums, a cinema, a library and a gallery run with the community council's support. The Arctic Film Festival takes place each year in Kulturhuset, the town's screening venue, and the weekly newspaper Svalbardposten has been published since 1948.

The calendar follows the light. Polarjazz, held since 1998, fills the end of the dark season in February; Solfestuka, the Sun Festival Week around 8 March, celebrates the first sunlight to reach most of the town after the polar night — the first official sunrise comes in mid-February, but the mountains keep the streets in shadow for weeks. In late October Dark Season Blues brings four days of local, Norwegian and international musicians to most of the town's venues just as the sun leaves for the winter.

The rules are unlike the mainland's. Anyone heading outside is recommended to carry a rifle against polar bears, alcohol purchases are rationed, and most live animals may not be imported. Burials have long been avoided, as bodies do not decompose in the frozen ground — the bodies of victims of the 1918 flu were found not to have decomposed and could be preserving microorganisms. Snowmobiles are part of everyday life, and in 2008 more than two-thirds of households owned one.

Between about 2,400 and 2,800 people live in Longyearbyen. It is a young town — roughly half of its people are aged between 20 and 44, there are about 400 children and very few elderly — and a mobile one: in 2009 only about a quarter of residents had lived there since before 2000, and students and staff in tourism, education and government come and go fastest. Many of the Norwegians come from the north of the country, and residents are better educated than the national average.

Coal built the town, but the last Norwegian mine closed in 2025. Work now comes from tourism, research and public services: the University Centre in Svalbard teaches Arctic studies to about 350 students alongside the Norwegian Polar Institute, the Svalbard Satellite Station operates on Platåberget, and the Governor of Svalbard, the hospital and other state offices employ many more. Most tourism is about nature rather than the town itself, and in 2008 the average visitor stayed just over two nights.

Residents live in the houses of Lia, Haugen and Gruvedalen, or in student housing at Nybyen, and shop at Svalbardbutikken, the only grocery store. Local democracy is a live issue: since the 2023 local elections only people who have previously lived on the Norwegian mainland for three years may vote for the community council, a change that took the vote away from many foreign residents.

Longyearbyen's restaurants make the most of what the Arctic provides. Several serve local specialities such as seal and whale, and reindeer appears on menus too, from wraps to fine dining. Huset, the 1950s miners' community centre that over the years served as post office, library, church, school and gymnasium, became a bistro in 2010 and since 2022 has been a Nordic fine-dining restaurant built around local game and foraged ingredients, including seal, whale and ptarmigan. The wider Norwegian kitchen is here as well: high cuisine in Norway leans heavily on game such as reindeer and rock ptarmigan, and whale meat was once a cheap everyday substitute for beef.

Everything else arrives by plane or ship, and Svalbardbutikken, the town's only grocery store, stocks food, fresh produce and duty-free goods for the many visitors who self-cater. Svalbard's tax-free status makes alcohol much cheaper than on the mainland, though purchases are rationed. Svalbard Bryggeri, the northernmost commercial brewery in the world, could only open in 2015 after Norway's parliament changed a law banning commercial alcohol production on the archipelago; part of the water in its beers comes from thawed ice from the Bogerbreen glacier, and its cans are sold across mainland Norway.