Umeå

People have lived in the Ume River valley for thousands of years; the rock carvings at Norrforsen, 15 kilometres west of the city, date from around 3000 BCE. The name is thought to come from the Old Norse Úma, "roaring", making Umeå "the roaring river". The first written mention dates from the 14th century, when the coast was being settled by people who came north by boat along the Bothnian Bay. Umeå began as a parish, with a wooden church and a trading post at Backen, and for centuries remained a scattering of farms where goods from the Sámi were traded, the last inhabited area before the northern wilderness.

An early attempt to found a town failed, and Umeå lost its town privileges in the 1590s. Gustavus Adolphus re-established it in 1622, and by 1638 it had about 40 houses; in 1647 it became the seat of Västerbotten county. It was attacked by Russian forces in 1714 and burned to the ground in 1720, and at the end of the Finnish War in 1809 a Russian army occupied it from June to August. On 25 June 1888 a fire devastated the eastern part of the town and left at least 2,300 of its 3,000 inhabitants homeless. In the rebuilding almost 3,000 silver birches were planted along wide avenues to stop fires from spreading, which gave Umeå its nickname, the City of Birches. The river kept silting up, and since the 1920s the port has been at Holmsund near its mouth.

Umeå University, founded in 1965, transformed the city: the population grew rapidly and housing doubled between 1980 and 2010. In 2014 Umeå was a European Capital of Culture together with Riga, and in 2020 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Emmanuelle Charpentier for the CRISPR gene-editing research she had led at the university.

Music has a large place in Umeå. In the 1990s its hardcore punk scene, with bands such as Refused and labels such as Desperate Fight Records, made the city the European centre of straight edge culture, with shows every week for years; Västerbottens Museum told the story in a 2013 exhibition, "Umeå — the European Capital of Hardcore 1989–2000". Metal bands such as Meshuggah and Cult of Luna also come from the city. The Umeå Jazz Festival, first held in 1968, is one of the larger Scandinavian festivals for modern jazz.

The city has the opera company of northern Sweden, NorrlandsOperan, an English-language theatre company, the Bildmuseet art museum and the arts campus on the river, and its year as European Capital of Culture in 2014 left behind the Väven cultural centre. SVT and TV4 run their northern Swedish operations from Umeå, and the landscapes around the city inspired the video game Unravel. Umeå is a member of the International Cities of Refuge Network, sheltering persecuted writers and artists.

Sport is popular: Umeå IK plays women's football at Gammliavallen, the ice-hockey team IF Björklöven, whose name means "the birch leaves", was very successful in the 1980s, and Rally Sweden has been based here since 2022. The city's Ume Sámi name is Ubmeje and its Finnish name Uumaja, and Finland is the most common country of origin among residents born abroad.

About 92,000 people lived in the urban area in 2020, and about 132,000 in the municipality at the beginning of 2023, making Umeå the largest place in Norrland. Its two universities, Umeå University and a branch of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, have around 40,000 enrolled students, about 30 per cent of the population. In 2015 about one in ten residents of the municipality was born abroad, most often in Finland, Iraq, Iran or Somalia.

The economy rests on education, research and health care — the university hospital serves the whole of northern Sweden — alongside industry, including Komatsu Forest's European headquarters and Volvo Trucks. Research includes plant science at the Umeå Plant Science Centre, and the city has been certified as a sustainable destination. The municipality plans for 200,000 inhabitants by 2050, a projection that an independent study has questioned.

Life is lived by bike and bus between the centre and districts such as Ålidhem, Teg and Haga, each with its own small shopping centre and supermarkets; locals live "on" their district rather than in it. Summer evenings are spent by the river and at Nydalasjön, winter means snow and short days, and the academic year sets the rhythm of the city's bars and clubs.

Umeå's best-known food comes from the county it governs. Västerbotten cheese is a hard cow's-milk cheese with tiny holes and a firm, granular texture; as with Cheddar, the curd is heated, cut and stirred before the cheese is moulded and aged, for at least 12 months and more often 14. The village of Burträsk claims it was invented there in the 1870s by a dairy maid, Ulrika Eleonora Lindström, and it is still made only at the dairy in Burträsk. Its most common use is västerbottensostpaj, a pie filled with the cheese, cream, eggs and black pepper, eaten across Sweden at Christmas, Easter, Midsummer and during the crayfish season in August.

Everyday eating reflects a young, student-heavy city. Kebab and pizza places are everywhere, and the rullkebab — rolled kebab and rolled pizza — sold at the grill on Rådhustorget is counted a local speciality. At lunchtime some restaurants serve husmanskost, traditional Swedish home cooking. Indian, Chinese and Japanese restaurants and pizzerias are among the places to eat in the centre, where most shops line Kungsgatan and Storgatan.

Further north, the best-known traditional dish of Sápmi is sautéed reindeer, served with mashed potatoes and lingonberries, and across Sweden cloudberries are served as a topping for ice cream, pancakes and waffles.