Svalbard

Svalbard has no indigenous population. The Dutchman Willem Barentsz recorded the islands in 1596, and for the next two centuries they were a base for Dutch, English, Danish, and Norwegian whaling and walrus hunting, followed by Russian and Norwegian trappers wintering over. From the late nineteenth century the archipelago became a launching point for polar expeditions, several of which ended in disaster.

Coal, discovered in workable quantities around 1900, brought the first permanent settlements. The American businessman John Munro Longyear founded the town that bears his name; Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, British, and Dutch companies staked claims across an archipelago that belonged, formally, to no one.

The 1920 Svalbard Treaty, in force from 1925, resolved this: Norway was granted full sovereignty, but on unusual terms. Citizens and companies of all signatory countries — 49 of them as of 2026, including Russia — have equal rights to live, work, and carry out economic activity there; the archipelago must not be used for "warlike purposes"; Norway may tax only what is needed to run Svalbard; and it must safeguard the environment. This is why a Russian state company still operates the mining town of Barentsburg, and why some 65 per cent of Svalbard is now protected in national parks and reserves. Norwegian coal mining wound down to its last pit, Mine 7, which closed on 30 June 2025, and Longyearbyen has reinvented itself around tourism, research, and the world's northernmost university centre.

Longyearbyen is a small, transient, international community — most residents stay a few years — with a frontier practicality about it: people keep a rifle for trips out of town, and rely on one another in a place where the nearest help can be hours away.

There is a strong "northernmost" novelty to daily life — the world's northernmost airport with scheduled flights, and its northernmost research and higher-education institution — alongside a serious scientific culture, with climate, glacier, and space research shaping the calendar and the conversation. The old company-town legacy lingers in the museum, the preserved mine cableways, and the pit-head buildings.

Because of the permafrost and the limited hospital, there is a long-standing practice of moving the seriously ill to the mainland; burials in Longyearbyen were stopped in 1950, when it was found that bodies from the 1918 flu pandemic had not decomposed, and the dead are sent to the mainland instead. The polar night and the midnight sun structure moods and routines as much as any festival.

Around 2,900 people live in Svalbard, most of them in Longyearbyen, whose population is put at roughly 2,400 to 2,800, with about 300 in the Russian settlement of Barentsburg and 30 to 35 year-round at the international research base of Ny-Ålesund, the world's northernmost functional civilian settlement.

The economy has shifted decisively from coal to tourism — expedition cruises, snowmobile and dog-sled tours, glacier and ice-cave trips, and aurora and wildlife trips — plus research, higher education, and a satellite ground station that exploits the polar orbit. Barentsburg keeps mining coal. Everything else is imported, and the cost of living is high despite the tax-free status.

Daily life is organised around the season's light, the weather window, the supply ship and flights, and the constant awareness that the wilderness — and its bears — begins at the edge of town.

For its size, Longyearbyen has a strong food scene, built on Arctic ingredients: reindeer (the stubby Svalbard subspecies), Arctic char, ptarmigan, seal, minke whale, king crab, and cloudberries, served in restaurants such as Huset, the 1950s miners' community centre, some of them in old mining buildings. Everything else — vegetables, dairy, grains — is flown or shipped in.

The tax-free regime makes wine and spirits relatively cheap, though how much alcohol a person may buy each month is restricted by law. The supermarket is surprisingly well stocked for self-caterers.

"Northernmost" branding attaches to much of it, and a long dark winter gives coffee, cake, and the communal meal an outsized place in the social calendar.

The scenery is the attraction: glaciers calving into fjords, sharp brown mountains, huge seabird cliffs, and, in season, walrus haul-outs, Arctic foxes, Svalbard reindeer, and — for the lucky and well-guided — polar bears. Boat trips from Longyearbyen reach the Nordenskiöld Glacier and the bird colonies and old trapper huts along the coast.

In winter, guided snowmobile and dog-sled expeditions cross the frozen valleys to ice caves carved by meltwater beneath the glaciers, and the northern lights appear even at midday during the polar night. In summer, hikes climb the ridges above town and multi-day trips venture deeper into the protected interior.

Near the airport, the concrete wedge of the Global Seed Vault — the "doomsday vault" holding backup samples of the world's crop seeds in the permafrost — can be seen from outside but not entered. And a boat or snowmobile trip up Billefjorden reaches Pyramiden, a Soviet coal town founded by Sweden in 1910, sold to the Soviet Union in 1927 and abandoned when mining ceased in 1998, complete with the world's northernmost Lenin monument, an empty swimming pool, and silent apartment blocks, now kept up as a tourist destination with a renovated hotel.