As we walked, our guide, Anika Paust, explained about the polar night - from roughly December 10 until mid-January Svalbard is in total darkness. We headed into town, no rough frontier place these days but full of bright buildings: schools*, restaurants*, even a Thai supermarket* (the Thai, numbering some 200, form the second-largest ethnic group on Svalbard lovesick miners went to Thailand on holiday in the 1980s and brought back more than photographs). “I thought it would be nice to have something of our own here,” he told me. Today, he produces 250,000 litres a year, made mostly with water from a nearby glacier. It is owned by Robert Johansen, 57, a former miner who fought for years to overturn a 1928 brewing ban on Svalbard (authorities thought that a combination of alcohol and miners stuck in a tiny settlement might not be such a great one). We headed out on a walking tour, starting at the Svalbard Brewery*, down by the Adventfjord on which Longyearbyen sits. (For reasons of space, it will henceforth be denoted with an asterisk.) We dropped our bags at the Radisson Blu Polar, the world’s northernmost serviced hotel, by now realising that the prefix “world’s northernmost” would feature a lot during our visit. We arrived in Longyearbyen, population 2,100 (of the archipelago’s 2,500 total) and, at 78 degrees, the world’s northernmost town (only a couple of military and research bases are closer to the pole). And it is hoped that my busload of visitors, along with the 135,000 other tourists who will journey here this year, are a large part of it. Of those, the largest, at Sveagruva, 44km as the crow flies from the capital, is due to close later this year. It gave Norway sovereignty, but also allowed the 13 other original signatories (now grown to 42, including Afghanistan, North Korea and Russia) the rights for their citizens to reside in Svalbard and for their nations to engage in mining there.Ī global collapse in coal prices, from around $120 a tonne in 2011 to $45 a tonne today, and the costs of mining at this latitude, mean that today only three mines remain. The second free-for-all followed as mines opened up along the fiords - there was no national claim to the islands until the Svalbard Treaty of 1920. In the early 20th century an American, John Munro Longyear, discovered coal. From the 17th to the early 19th centuries it had been a hunting free-for-all, as the British, Dutch and Danish slaughtered the whales for oil, the polar bears for their pelts and walruses for their ivory, almost to the point of extinction. Dutchman Willem Barentsz had first sighted the islands in 1596 and christened them Spitsbergen (Dutch for “sharp-peaked mountains”). On the drive into Longyearbyen (five minutes, on a 5km stretch of the archipelago’s 46km of roads), the driver explained a little of Svalbard’s history. Just as well, then, that a visit to Svalbard is about much more than bears. For most visitors - 97 per cent, in fact - our friend at the airport is the closest they’ll come. Sightings do occur near to the city - there was the tragic case of the British schoolboy killed by a bear 40km from Longyearbyen in 2011 - but they are rare. The bears largely live on the pack ice, in areas fiercely protected by the Norwegian government, hundreds of kilometres north of the capital, Longyearbyen. Many tourists travelling to this Norwegian archipelago, three hours’ flying time due north from Oslo and just 1,300km from the North Pole, come to see the islands’ 3,000 bears.
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