Gaz
At International Islands the plan is literally to write about islands throughout the globe, ideally ones we’ve been to! I was recently in Spitsbergen, the most northernly settled island in the world and, well quite a remote island.
What’s the story with Spitsbergen?
Spitsbergen formerly known as West Spitsbergen; Norwegian:, also sometimes spelled Spitzbergen is the largest and only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago in kind of northern Norway.
In fact Svalbard is often times considered a country to an extent due to its special laws, In Essence any signatory to the Svalbard Treaty can create a business and live here, in reality this means Russians, with Russian colonies making up two of the three settlements on the island.
History of Spitsbergen
Whalers frequented the island group from around the 1500’s and it had a very ambiguous “ownership for a very very long time. This was to continue until the 1925 Svalbard Treaty that followed WW1.
Said treaty means a bunch of stuff, but most importantly that Svalbard and Spitsbergen are integral parts of Norway.
To read if Svalbard is country click here.
Since then it has ben dominated by Norwegian and Soviet coal mining settlements, until the world pushed bt Greta decided coal was bad. Now the island is all about tourism and has to an extent a bustling community doing tourism, science and service industry stuff.
Getting to Spitzbergen
Either by ship, as it is an island, chopper, or flight. Flights go into Svalbard Airport, which is a small affair mainly serviced by budget operator SAS, or Scandinavian Airways.
It services the capital of Longyearbyen, which has a population of about 2000 and has most of the infrastructure and all of the nightlife.
To read about Longyearbyen click here.
Settlements on Spitzbergen
There’s basically 3 major settlements on the island, the aforementioned Longyearbyen, Barentsberg, an active coal mining Russian place and Pyramiden, a ghost town former Russian settlement that now focuses on tourism.
Visiting the later two is harder due to sanctions, but also far from impossible now.
To read about Pyramiden click here
Spitzbergen vital statistics
Size – 37,673 km2 (14,546 sq mi)
Island ranking – 38th biggest in the world
Population – 2,995
International Island Spitzbergen Rank
One of the best and remote islands in the world that you can visit, OK it is not tropical, but that is not what all islands are about. If you want northern derelict and a sheer sense of what humans can endure, then this has it all.
