Pyramid mountain
Gives the town its name.
Guillaume Baviere from Uppsala, Sweden — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Zairon — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Christoph Strässler — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Guillaume Baviere from Uppsala, Sweden — CC BY-SA 2.0
Pyramiden is an abandoned coal-mining town in Svalbard, at the head of Billefjorden on Spitsbergen, about 50 km in a straight line north of Longyearbyen. It takes its name from the pyramid-shaped mountain beside it and has become a tourist destination. Sweden founded it in 1910 and sold it to the Soviet Union in 1927, and it remained a mining town until it closed in 1998. Since then it has stood largely empty, the bitter cold preserving most of its buildings and equipment as they were left, so it feels as if time stopped there. Visitors walk with a guide among its brick and wooden buildings, the grassy central square, the culture house, the school and the old swimming pool, with striped mountains of rock and snow behind. The town's hotel reopened in 2013, only a few caretakers live there in summer, and it looks over the fjord where pieces of ice drift. It is reached by boat in summer or by snowmobile in winter, on paid guided trips from Longyearbyen. Do not wander outside the town without a guide because of polar bears, and bring warm clothes even in summer.
Gives the town its name.
As they were left.
Drifting ice.
Billefjorden, Spitsbergen, Svalbard
By boat in summer or snowmobile in winter from Longyearbyen.
A few caretakers in summer.