Information about Svalbard

The ice kingdom, Spitzbergen, is the largest island of the Svalbard archipelago and the nearest territory to the North Pole. In this very polar world, two-thirds of the land are constantly covered with ice.

Svalbard has an area of 63,000 km² (almost as much as Ireland), and Spitzbergen, the largest island, is 39,000 km². Svalbard’s rocky peaks reach 1,700m high in a winter environment where constant daylight reigns for two and a half months of the year. Deserted of any human civilisation for a very long time, the archipelago today has 2,400 inhabitants who are divided between two areas: Barentsburg, a Russian community with 800 people, and Longyearbyen, the Spitzbergen administrative capital, which numbers 1,600 Norwegians.