Tromso, Norway

At a latitude of nearly 70 degrees north, four days’ sailing from Bergen and barely a two-hour flight from Oslo, Murmansk or Longyearbyen, at the same latitude as Alaska and Siberia, between the island landscape, fiords and mountain peaks, you find Tromsø – Gateway to the Arctic and capital

of Northern Norway. As far back as a century ago, visitors were surprised to find culture, intellectual life and the current fashions so far north, and the city derived the name Paris of the North.

Tromsø was founded in 1794, although the first church was built here back in 1252. In the 1850s, Tromsø became the centre for Polar sea catches in the Arctic region, while in the early 1900s the city was the starting point for a host of expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic regions, something

that gave the city the nickname Gateway to the Arctic. In 1940, Tromsø was capital of the non-occupied Norway for a few weeks, but totally avoided war damage as the only city in Northern Norway. In the years after 1960, Tromsø has experienced an exceptional growth in population, which is in part due to the establishment of institutions like the University of Tromsø and the Norwegian Polar Institute.

Northern Lights

The Northern Lights are particles that are hurled into space after storms on the sun’s surface. They are attracted by the magnetic North Pole, and enter the atmosphere in a ring-like zone around the pole. In a process that is identical to that inside a light tube, the energy is released as light.
Tromsø is situated right in the centre of the Northern Lights zone and is, therefore, together with the interior ice in Greenland the tundra in northern Canada, among the best places on earth to observe this phenomenon. Most of the Northern Lights outbursts visible from Tromsø are green, but large outbursts can also include other colours.


Aurora Borealis timelapse HD - Tromsø 2010 from Tor Even Mathisen on Vimeo.