Forgotten Worlds of Western Europe.

So, you may recall that we recently published a video on this channel, identifying and discussing the Forgotten Worlds dotted all across what is — culturally, at least — seen as Eastern Europe.

From Tskaltubo in Georgia all the way to Pyramiden in the Arctic Circle, our list featured sites which generally served some specific purpose or other in the 20th century. But when those purposes vanished with the collapse of communism, they mostly became little more than relics, decaying and exposed to the ravages of time and nature.

Now, western Europe obviously did not have quite the same experience in the 20th century. As such, the likes of closed towns such as Skrunda-1 or Akarmara didn’t really exist west of the Iron Curtain in quite the same way as east of it.

But does that mean that once-great places — now forlorn or forgotten — aren’t to be found in western Europe too? Absolutely not. Whether by disaster, misadventure, or simply the passage of time, there are several places in western Europe which now sit similarly bereft of inhabitants.

So let’s check out a few of those.

Craco

No; not Krakow, Poland — although there is something these places do have in common (other than the name).

Both are places renowned for their beauty, punctuated by a majestic castle on a hill rising above their cityscapes. But that is where the similarities end. Because Krakow, Poland, is a thriving modern city and Craco, Italy…is not. It has been abandoned for almost half a century, and its homes and streets, bell towers and churches are now empty — dishevelled and worn out beneath the southern Italian sun.

With that said, it is not that the now-ghost town doesn’t see any human life.

In fact, Craco remains very much a draw to this day, being regularly visited by tours from the nearby city of Matera, a distance of less than one hour by car. Both towns lie in the southern region of Basilicata, with the closest major transit hub being the international airport at Bari, itself less than two hours’ drive to Craco directly.

Now, despite being currently uninhabited, you may be inclined to think — given its lush views, the surrounding valleys, its relative accessibility and the survival of towns nearby, that living in Craco must — at least at some point — have been really quite amenable.

Not really.

You see, despite a long history, Craco was plagued by vulnerability to natural disasters: so much so that its residents finally had enough and shipped out in 1980.

The area was inhabited as early as 540 BC by Greek settlers, and by the early Middle Ages it had become a thriving provincial centre. Craco even, at one time, had its own university — and its population remained rather consistent (at between 1 and 3,000 people) over most of the following centuries. But by the early 20th century, life in the town had become rather miserable.

Craco was — and remains — situated on a sheer cliff face over 400 metres tall — which had once served a strategic purpose: allowing the population to identify military threats from afar. But the same elevation caused land drainage to be highly unsustainable, in what was already an arid region subject to cyclical parching. Aside from making successful irrigation of crops difficult, poor drainage also led to more than a few catastrophic landslides, which ravaged the town in the years 1600, 1805, 1857, and 1933.

Poor agricultural conditions between 1892 and 1922 caused severe food shortages, which in turn led a large portion of Craco’s population to migrate en masse to North America. In the 1950s, as soil quality deteriorated even further, pipe irrigation systems were installed to attempt to remedy the situation. But these failed, and yet another disastrous landslide in 1963 caused the population to fall even more, as many locals relocated to the nearby phoenix town of Craco Peschiera.

In 1972, a flash flood killed off what few prospects of permanent residency remained, creating yet more landslides and making Craco’s buildings ever more hazardous to live in. By this point, locals must have started to believe some higher power simply had no intention of allowing them to live in their ancestral home. The question seemed to be conclusively answered when an earthquake struck in 1980. Craco — by now known as Craco Vecchia or Old Craco — has remained a ghost town ever since.

Still, given its unique sights and history, the town has drawn a thriving tourism industry. Its key features include the abandoned monastery of San Pietro and the remains of the Norman Tower, offering a rich view of the surrounding fields and landscape.

Craco Vecchia has become one of southern Italy’s most renowned features, and even a prominent movie set, with parts of the James Bond film Quantum of Solace and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ having been filmed there.

Even so, it remains decidedly abandoned — and the haunting views of its streets seem to suggest a solitude far predating the 45 years since its evacuation.

Svalbard’s Forgotten Settlements

Now, we discussed the former settlement of Pyramiden in our previous video, one of three former Soviet settlements which existed on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, and which closed its doors permanently in 1998. The other two didn’t fare a whole lot better. The mining village of Grumant ceased operations in 1965, with only a few shell-like structures remaining where the settlement once stood. Even the principal Soviet settlement of Barentsburg hasn’t exactly thrived in recent years.

It lingers on as an inhabited town today — although at about 400 residents, it is just about clinging on for dear life.

But what’s interesting about Svalbard is the peculiar geostrategic balance which has existed there for more than a century.

Naturally, it doesn’t make such sense — geographically, at least — for two communities inhabiting the same archipelago in the Arctic to be called Western or Eastern European. This is especially true given that all three Soviet settlements of Pyramiden, Grumant, and Barentsburg were located closer to the largest Norwegian town (Longyearbyen) than it was to any of the remaining Norwegian settlements. In fact, Grumant — which once had a population of around 1,000 residents — was located only 10 kilometers from Longyearbyen: so on a clear day, more or less a walkable distance (save for the threat of Svalbard’s 3,000 polar bears).

Politically, however, the Norwegian settlements on Svalbard were — without doubt — western European, whereas the Soviet mining towns obviously weren’t. The distinction is important, as it also helps to explain their respective decays.

Over time, Norway established settlements of various kinds to make use of Svalbard’s unique climate and natural resources. It wasn’t the only nation to do so — and throughout the centuries, similar sites were built by Denmark, Britain and the Dutch for coal mining, fishing and whaling. This was possible because the area was long considered terra nullius, or nobody’s land. But that changed with the signing of the Svalbard Treaty in 1920, which gave stewardship over the archipelago to Norway while allowing free commercial activity on the territory to any of the treaty’s signatories who wished to make use of it.

Most who did generally established only meteorological or seasonal research facilities — including Poland, which maintains a station of 12 scientists on the southern tip of Svalbard to this day. Norway itself operates two other desolate settlements: one is the former mining village of Nybyen, which features a series of colorful little structures including an art gallery, a restaurant, a club, a cinema, and even a small residence for students from Svalbard’s University Centre in Longyearbyen. The other Norwegian settlement is the hamlet of Ny-Alesund, located all the way on the northwestern fringe of the archipelago, with a population of between 35 in the winter and around 117 in the summer.

Ny-Alesund is a company town run by the Norwegian state-owned Kings Bay enterprise, which provides facilities for 19 research institutions located there. Ny-Alesund is also the northernmost functional civilian settlement in the world — and due to its extreme isolation, is accessible only by flight or boat journey from Longyearbyen, or from the Norwegian mainland itself.

But aside from this, remnants of former whaling or coal mining stations can be found dotted at various spots all across the archipelago. One example is Ny-London (or New London), a British marble-mining settlement established close to Ny-Alesund by the Northern Exploration Company in 1911. New London was abandoned in 1920, but its lonely wooden structures continue to stand in place until this day.

And another example is Smeerenburg — once a Dutch whaling station on the furthest northern fringe of Svalbard — which was in operation in the 17th century, and of which only a few stone structures now remain. Two previous Norwegian settlements on Svalbard have also been discarded: Hiorthhamn, which existed for four years before ceasing mining operations in the early 1900s, and Sveagruva, which was Svalbard’s most productive coal mine for much of its 100-year existence before it, too, closed its doors in 2020. Sveagruva, unlike most other such sites on the territory, was meticulously disassembled following its closure — and practically no traces of its existence remain today.

And this is where the distinction comes in.

You see, unlike in Pyramiden, the Norwegians inhabiting and working the mining settlements of Svalbard were likely incentivised by the lucrative yield of the commercial enterprises carried out in them. As such, it was in the workers’ interest to put up with the harsh realities of the Arctic climate — and they were otherwise free to leave whenever. This was almost certainly not the case in the neighbouring Soviet settlements.

In Pyramiden, for example, life was made somewhat agreeable by the range of amenities provided to residents. But even so, the miners and labourers who moved there were probably not in a position to abandon ship if they found the environment too disfavourable. To actively choose to leave would either have been really rather impossible…or really rather unwise.

Perhaps small wonder, then, that Pyramiden folded only a few years after the Soviet Union collapsed, and Barentsburg has seen its number of residents halved in the years since 1991. Longyearbyen — by comparison — has seen its population more than double in the same period, becoming today a thriving town of almost 3,000 residents, representing a total of around 53 nationalities.

Grindavik, Iceland

So here’s a fun fact.

You might be inclined to think that the country of Iceland would be relatively close by — or at least, at a similar degree of latitude or northwardliness — to Svalbard, with both of them being located at opposite ends of the Norwegian Sea. But no: in fact, Iceland’s capital Reykjavik is far south of Svalbard, having a latitude roughly similar to the central Norwegian city of Trondheim. It is also separated from the Svalbard archipelago by more than 1,500 kilometres of open sea. To put it another way, in straight line distances, Reykjavik is roughly as close to Amsterdam as it is to Svalbard’s capital Longyearbyen.

Anyway, about 55 kilometres southwest of Reykjavik sits the fishing town of Grindavík, on the southern coast of Iceland along the Reykjanes Peninsula. The town, until recently, was home to about 3,600 people — and despite its unassuming profile, it was a place of some renown, due to its proximity to some of Iceland’s best-known features. One of these is the Blue Lagoon — a geothermal spa located only 3 kilometres north of Grindavik. Also nearby sit some of Iceland’s best-known volcanoes, which are equally a draw for tourists, but which put paid to the entire town in November 2023.

That month, what became known as the Sundhnúkur eruptions began. Volcanic activity had become a concern in the peninsula three years previously, when the Eldvörp–Svartsengi volcanic system suddenly became active after years of lying dormant. Over time, this led to thousands of mini-earthquakes, which in turn caused worrying underground movement of magma (or subterranean lava).

Huge magma intrusions began to form near Grindavik, leading to tremors which caused the streets and roads to start splitting open. Within days, the Icelandic Meteorological Office had detected an intrusion stretching ominously towards the town, and a state of emergency was declared. When on November 10th, another strong series of earthquakes struck, the Icelandic authorities issued an immediate evacuation order to the majority of Grindavík’s residents.

Residents were given little time to leave, and while the initial departure was considered temporary, subsequent eruptions afforded little chance of reprieve. In the following weeks and months, a nearby chain of volcanic craters erupted no less than eight times, resulting in lava spills which reached the outskirts of the town, damaging infrastructure and homes. The eruptions have continued in the time ever since — and in April 2025, all remaining residents of Grindavik were evacuated.

The eruptions also led to wildfires and disruption to electricity and water sources on the peninsula. The Blue Lagoon itself was also subject to several temporary closures, as was the nearby Svartsengi geothermal power station — the primary source of water heating system for the entire Reykjanes Peninsula, or more than 21,000 Icelandic households.

Now, it is perhaps unfair to call Grindavik forgotten — as there remains a chance that its residents may yet return to the town one day. During lulls between the eruptions, the Icelandic authorities began allowing the town’s locals to return to recover their possessions, boat owners to sail their vessels out of the harbour, and even some limited return to commercial activity in the town during set hours of the day.

But in practice, a permanent return to Grindavik seems unlikely. In the weeks and months after the evacuation, housing was sought for the displaced residents elsewhere on the Reykjanes Peninsula or in Reykjavik itself, and Iceland’s major banks agreed to waive interest housing loans for properties in the stricken town. Grindavik has more-or-less been turned into Silent Hill by the fissures, and some of its buildings now feature gaping holes caused by the force of the tremors.

Seismologists have predicted that the Grindavik fissure eruptions could continue for decades — if not centuries — something which severely calls into question the safety of the entire peninsula, if not the entire country of Iceland itself.

Skellig Michael

Further south in the Atlantic Ocean lies the island nation of Ireland. And sitting in silent view of Ireland is the former monastic settlement of the island of Skellig Michael, complete with a sequence of thousand-year-old stone huts and a thriving community of puffins, seagulls, and gray seals.

Skellig Michael — or Great Skellig — is one of two islands which together form the Skelligs, located 12 kilometres off Ireland’s southwestern coast. In practice, the Skelligs are little more than a pair of rocky crags — but that didn’t stop a community of monks being established there in roughly the 7th century AD. You see, early Christian communities built their monasteries in isolated locations to escape the distractions of life in more populated environments, and to devote themselves entirely to spiritual practices. Skellig Michael — being one of the most inhospitable locations and lonesome places imaginable — was just perfect for such an objective.

Although the island is every bit as hostile to humans as practically any other rock in the Atlantic would be, it did have a flat terrace roughly 180 meters above the sea, on which structures could stand. Not only that, but its vast quantities of rock allowed for the building of huts using dry-stone techniques; in other words, piling stones and pebbles on top of one another to create rudimentary structures. And so the monks who inhabited the crag built their beehive huts — known as clocháns — from pieces of rock, and continued their abstinent existence for several centuries. The community was never very large — at its peak, probably no more than 12 monks and an abbot — but in addition to the six huts, the site featured two oratories, a hermitage, a church, and even a small cemetery.

Of course, Skellig Michael was every bit as hospitable as you might think, being subject to harsh rains and the high winds of the Atlantic. It also contained no native flora, vegetation or agriculture of its own. Yet the monks showed remarkable creativity and resilience which allowed them to continue their seclusion for as long as they did. They grew vegetables on a small arable depression between the island’s peaks — known as the Wailing Woman gap — and otherwise subsisted on fish and the meat and eggs of local birds.

Unfortunately, the small size of the community — combined with its prominent and indefensible location — made Skellig Michael vulnerable to another great hazard of the time: Viking raids. According to surviving texts from medieval Irish history, the monastery was subject to its first raid in 823, when Viking raiders made off with precious relics and the abbot. Several more raids took place over the coming centuries, and by the 13th century, the monastery had been abandoned and the community relocated to Ballinskelligs, on the Irish mainland.

In the following centuries, the site remained in the possession of the Catholic church and became a pilgrimage site — until it was stripped and handed to an Anglican land-owning family under Elizabethan anti-Catholic land reforms in the 16th century. Ultimately, the Skelligs came into the possession of the Irish state, and the former settlement was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.

Skellig Michael is still visitable today — and like Craco — has been used as a Hollywood film set: having been featured in no less than three movies from the Star Wars franchise. But visiting the site is no less hazardous today than it would have been 1,000 years ago. The terrace can only be accessed by a sheer 600-step stone path, rising sharply from the landing coves and with no handrails to provide grip against the winds and rain. In 2009, two visitors died in separate instances following falls from the same ledge on route to the monastery.

As a precaution therefore, access to the storied island is strictly limited — and prohibited entirely outside of the relatively mild summer seasons of May until October each year.

St Kilda

Further north, also on the eastern fringe of the Atlantic and around 170 kilometres off the coast of Scotland, lies a lonely archipelago known as St Kilda.

One thing that St Kilda and Skellig Michael have in common is that they are remnants of the Gaelic culture which flourished in Scotland and Ireland for over a thousand years. Human habitation on St Kilda carried on until much more recently than on Great Skellig — but unfortunately, both have met a similar fate, being today totally devoid of a permanent population.

But curiously, what is known about St Kilda is that its habitation extends even further back than that of the Skelligs or even many other places on the British isles — possibly going as far back as the Bronze Age, more than 2,000 years ago. A visiting Scottish clergyman in the 1500s described the islanders as a group of pagans, subsisting on livestock and primitive forms of agriculture. The community was very small — around 180 people at its documented height in the 1600s — all of whom lived on the main island of Hirta, in a tiny settlement known simply as Am Baile (Scottish Gaelic for “The Village”).

The origins of the island culture are unknown — but suspected to be a blend of Gaelic and Viking influences. This was seemingly reflected in the peculiar language used by the islanders, which was described in the early 1700s as

“A very corrupt dialect of the Galic adulterated with a little mixture of the Norwegian tongue.”

The culture and traditions of the community contrasted highly with the British mainland, so isolated were they from the rest of the world. As on the Skelligs, the islanders were highly vulnerable to raids — but were known to flee to Hirta’s narrow and poorly-accessible caves when in fear of an expected attack. Their only line of contact with the outside world was by bonfires which — on a clear day — could just about be seen by locals on the Outer Hebrides, the northwesternmost Scottish islands. And when an expedition of British soldiers arrived at St Kilda in 1746, they found that the locals — once persuaded to come down from their caves — knew nothing of the then-ongoing Jacobite uprising in Scotland and had never heard of King George II of England either.

Yet despite their isolation, the St Kildans lived a self-sufficient, almost bountiful existence. They were able to grow barley and potatoes, and kept sheep and cattle as livestock — being able to even make a type of crude cheese out of sheep’s milk. Perhaps unusually, the community rarely fished — due to a combination of superstition and the hazards posed by the stormy, unpredictable surrounding sea.

Instead, they consumed large quantities of birds such as funnet, and further supplemented their diets with bird eggs. The St Kildans also caught puffins using a unique fowling technique, which involved draping a snare over the bird’s head and killing it without causing the entire flock to scatter. A record from 1764 noted the community of 90 people would devour as many as 3,240 eggs and 1,620 birds collectively on a daily basis, while also using rendered fat from the local species of fulmar birds as lamp oil, as well as seabird down to stuff their bedding.

With time, the archipelago began to be visited by missionaries — which resulted in the islanders converting to Christianity and which brought some improvements in living conditions, such as the establishment of Hirta’s first non-rudimentary structures. But the visitation also brought diseases which nearly killed off the entire population, with cholera and smallpox reducing the population to around 60 by the middle of the 18th century. Other than the illnesses brought from afar, however, the health of St Kildans was remarked as standing favourably in comparison with the inhabitants of places like the Outer Hebrides.

The community also had a unique social structure, wherein the daily routine would begin with prayers followed by a quasi-parliamentary sitting attended by all men, to discuss the day’s activities and in which all present had the right to speak. Minor infractions were punished by penalties, but no serious crime was ever recorded as having taken place amongst the islanders. The men caught birds and the women plucked their feathers by hand, but otherwise the daily work was shared evenly.

The St Kildan men were known to be skilled weavers — a skill not many would have shared in the industrialising Scotland of the 1800s.

However, with time, diseases began to wreak a greater and greater toll on the islanders, exacerbated by the arrival of tourists in the 19th century. Visits to the community were organised for curiosity travellers from Glasgow, and this helped to effectively kill off what remained of St Kilda’s centuries-old way of life. The tourists brought with them diseases such as smallpox, tuberculosis, whooping cough and neonatal tetanus, which collectively began to wrack the population as the century progressed.

Furthermore, the islanders began to become accustomed to receiving food provisions by boat, causing them to largely abandon their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life, which in turn made them vulnerable to disruptions in delivery caused by poor weather, or to poor crop yields on the island. This — combined with emigration to the mainland and to Australia in the late 19th and early 20th century, began to cause the community to decline dramatically. By 1928, the population stood at only 37 people, and two years later, the islanders gave up on their homeland entirely.

They petitioned the British government to relocate them to the mainland, and the last native St Kildans departed on the 29th of August 1930, bringing to an end thousands of years of continued existence on the archipelago. Among the departing group was an eight-year-old Rachel Johnson, who died as the last native St Kildan at the age of 93 in 2016.

Today, St Kilda is inhabited by nobody except for a large population of soay sheep and seals, as well as a diverse population of seabirds, including puffin, gannet, fulmar, razorbills, and Kittiwake.

Belchite

It was late in the summer of 1937, when artillery strikes began to rain down upon the small town of Belchite, located around 30 kilometres south of Zaragoza in northeastern Spain.

The Spanish Civil War was ongoing, and the town was in the hands of the nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco, later El Caudillo Franco, dictator and namesake of Francoist Spain. Early in the war, his forces had made blistering advances in the country’s north and south, driving their Republican adversaries east, although for now they still held Spain’s capital Madrid and the next largest cities of Barcelona and Valencia. The importance of securing major cities had become visible in the course of the war, and the Republican objective would be to retake Zaragoza, at that time located only a handful of kilometres between a thin Aragon front.

And so a massive assault was planned, stretching from Zuera, north of Zaragoza, to Belchite in the south. Taking the town would — it was thought — represent a huge strategic victory for the Republicans, and concurrently facilitate the retaking of Zaragoza itself.

And so the Republican offensive began, with 80,000 men including the 11th and 15th International Brigades, as well as six aviation squadrons armed with Soviet aircraft. The attack was preceded by a relentless bombing campaign, carried out mostly by Russian-made Polikarpov and Tupolev bombers. This was followed by a fierce pitched battle between the Republican attackers and Nationalist defenders, that reduced what remained of the town to ruin, and caused around 5,000 deaths in only a few days of fighting.

What resulted was a pyrrhic victory for the Republicans. They took Belchite, but failed in the wider Zaragoza offensive, suffering heavy losses of armaments and tanks. The town held little strategic value on its own — and what the Republicans had gained was a shattered husk and a few kilometres of territory, at the cost of around 2,800 dead and 6,000 wounded, against the Nationalists’ total casualty count of around 2,600.

Franco’s forces later regrouped, and reclaimed the shattered town six months later. The Nationalists preceded their counterattack with a bombing campaign of their own, blitzing Belchite once more with German Condors, and further devastating what was by now little more than a depleted shell.

A stark contrast with what it had once been.

Belchite’s origins are believed to stretch throughout multiple key periods in Spain’s history. It was probably settled during the Roman Era, and in the 12th century, it became the headquarters of an order of knights under Alfonso, King of Aragon and Navarre, to defend the advance of the Moors into northern Spain. At one time, Belchite had a population of Muslims, Christians and Jews — and its architecture was seen as a blend of Renaissance, Baroque, and Mudéjar (or Iberian-Muslim) styles. Its pre-war population was around 4,000 people, and the town’s most renowned features included the 16th century church of San Martin de Tours, and the former convent of San Agustín — which, by the end of the civil war in 1939, were both gutted and riddled with bullet holes.

And riddled with bullet holes they remain. Because Franco decided not to rebuild the town after his victory over the Republicans. Instead, he left it as a memorial to the bombing — and had Republican prisoners build a new Belchite next to the destroyed town. Aside from its ruined streets, the old town — today known as Antiguo Belchite — features a prominent cross ostensibly dedicated to the victims of the war, similar in style to Franco’s controversial Valley of Cuelgamuros monument near Madrid, which was also built by Republican prisoners in the years after the war.

The town has since been left as it stands, its ruins offering both a historical lesson and point of curiosity to visitors. Once again, in what could be seen as Western European cultural pattern shared with Craco and Skellig Michael, Belchite has been also used as a movie set in prominent 21st century filmmaking. The most notable of these is Guillermo Del Toro’s 2006 gothic fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth, set in 1944 against the aftermath of the civil war.

New Belchite remains a thriving town to this day — although, at 1,500 inhabitants, it has never quite accomplished the demographic heights of the pre-Civil War era.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Craco known for?

Craco is known for its beauty and majestic castle on a hill, but it has been abandoned for almost half a century due to natural disasters. It is now a popular tourist destination and has been used as a movie set for films like ‘Quantum of Solace’ and ‘The Passion of the Christ’.

Why was Craco abandoned?

Craco was abandoned due to its vulnerability to natural disasters, including landslides and floods. The final blow came in 1980 with an earthquake, after which the town was evacuated and has remained a ghost town ever since.

What are some of the notable features of Craco?

Some of the notable features of Craco include the abandoned monastery of San Pietro and the remains of the Norman Tower, which offer a rich view of the surrounding fields and landscape.

What happened to the town of Grindavik?

Grindavik was evacuated in November 2023 due to volcanic eruptions. The eruptions caused significant damage to the town, and while some residents have been allowed to return temporarily, a permanent return seems unlikely.

What is the significance of Skellig Michael?

Skellig Michael is a former monastic settlement established in the 7th century AD. It is known for its thousand-year-old stone huts and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It has also been used as a film set for the Star Wars franchise.

Why was St Kilda abandoned?

St Kilda was abandoned in 1930 due to a combination of factors, including disease brought by tourists, reliance on food provisions, and emigration. The last native St Kildans departed on August 29, 1930.

What is the history of Belchite?

Belchite was a town in northeastern Spain that was heavily damaged during the Spanish Civil War. It was left in ruins as a memorial to the war, and a new town was built nearby. The old town, known as Antiguo Belchite, is now a historical site and has been used as a movie set.

What is the current status of the old town of Belchite?

The old town of Belchite, known as Antiguo Belchite, remains in ruins and is a popular tourist destination. It has been used as a movie set for films like ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’.

What are some of the forgotten settlements in Svalbard?

Some of the forgotten settlements in Svalbard include Grumant, which ceased operations in 1965, and Pyramiden, which closed in 1998. The principal Soviet settlement of Barentsburg has also seen a significant decline in population.

What is the current population of Longyearbyen?

Longyearbyen, the largest Norwegian town in Svalbard, has a population of almost 3,000 residents, representing a total of around 53 nationalities.

Sources

• Original Places video: Forgotten Worlds of Western Europe.
• https://youtu.be/GD6RwrZJI7M?si=NVU1KbD11VfGU0_N
• https://youtu.be/ZSfTnxN9Ytc?si=4biSbQq5YFKevBv5&t=98
• https://worldpopulationreview.com/cities/norway/longyearbyen
• https://svalbardadventures.com/en/about-svalbard/longyearbyen-city/
• https://www.highland.gov.uk/site/gaelic-toolkit/toolkit/gaelic_history/index.html
• https://amarist.com/portfolio/san-agustin-church/
• https://www.wmf.org/monuments/old-belchite
• https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g1566379-Activities-Craco_Province_of_Matera_Basilicata.html
• https://www.independent.ie/regionals/kerry/news/tourist-falls-to-her-death-on-skelligs/27387373.html
• Hero image source by openverse, cc0.