What's life like in the World's Northernmost Town?! | Longyearbyen | SVALBARD

Welcome to Longyearbyen the World's Northernmost town. iIt's located on the island of Svalbard high up in the Arctic. This island is the home of many polar bears and also the place that I have called my home for the last four and a half years. This cute little village has a population of around 2,300 people coming from more than 50 different countries. Longyearbyen is the last stop before the North Pole and our seasons here can be quite rough. Temperatures drop to below 40 degrees during winter, we experience two and a half months of total darkness in our polar night and in the summer we live with constant daylight for four months even so I would say that this is the best place on earth Now we're gonna go to the top of the village on this side so I can show you the amazing view over the village. It really is beautiful, this little village! So from here you have a view over the entire village The main center is right there and you can see that this is the top of the village and out here there's not much there's only the one restaurant so they do call this like you're outside of the kind of like, you saw the sign it's you should be wary of polar bears here you shouldn't just go for a walk without a gun but when you have a car it's okay so yeah it's beautiful. I often get questions in general about Svalbard and I think maybe I should mention that from the beginning this was a coal mining village that's why you have the old mines and all of this all of the taubanebokkar which were used to bring the coal to the harbour so it could get shipped so everywhere you go really across the island you will see some kind of remnant or different things left over because they kind of left everything and now they're calling it a culture memory so you cant move it or ruin it, so you can always find these kind of things from that time. Now we have one active mine which is mine 7 and that is producing coal and energy for our village but now they are leaning towards tourism as the main income that's why we are suffering so bad during the covid crisis. I've lived here for four and a half years now and I still don't get tired of this view I find Hiorthfjellet to be just as amazing and kind of magnificent as I thought in the beginning when I moved here. I mean it it is a tiny village but it really doesn't feel like it there's always something to explore and now living in our cabin it kind of feels like our world opened up and became a little bit bigger because we're living ten minutes away from the village so we kind of feel like we have a bit of a commute and that's nice, I like driving a car so just going those 10 minutes and listening to podcasts is really nice. This is the main street this is pretty much where everything is here is one of the cafes and also a cinema and a library now we're gonna go and get a coffee at Fruene, in this beautiful weather it's 12 degrees everybody's happy. This is the bank and also the post office. They're always building something here so it's gonna be super noisy but this is the center of the village and here we have the cafe and everybody sitting outside because it is summer here we're gonna go get ourselves a coffee This is very cosy but this is also a part of a shopping center so you have Some other shops in here like the mix we can buy sausages I was gonna say, that's all I buy there. On Thursdays they have a café where everybody comes and does their knitting so you can go here on Thursdays and sit and knit with your buddies Here we have our shopping center. Main street and here we have our pharmacy and everything else for shopping Here is our only supermarket and we're going to continue up here now here is some of the shops when you come to Longyearbyen you can buy everything you need There are so many shops for outdoor gear here they have a lot and in here I usually buy my water bottles did you know that I for some reason always buy them specifically in this shop I feel like they have the best colors. If you want to buy a polar bear, a dead one you can go in here, I don't want to buy a dead Polar Bear. This is a very popular restaurant called Kroa Here is a hotel. We are at the end of the center, this is the main street we just walked the entire Main Street so there's not much more I can show you here these are the shops we have we have a couple of more but they're further down in the village and there's not really any difference from the shops that are here Yeah that is our main street. Living here really is something special. Every day you get to experience incredible nature and wildlife. Our village is filled with people with many of the same interests so meeting up with your friends often means going on a hike, checking out a nearby glacier on snowmobile or just setting up a fire outside to grill hot dogs under the Midnight Sun. In this Longyearbyen series I'm going to do my best to show you why this place stole my heart so stay tuned for part two.

Channel: Cecilia Blomdahl

Views: 359,963

Rating: 4.9008927 out of 5

Keywords: svalbard, northernmost, longyearbyen, arctic, winter, polar bears, norway, travel, north pole, cold, drone, north, scandinavia, europe, global seed vault

Id: fMqm-bCO4Ec

Length: 7min 59sec (479 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2020