Nobody locks their doors in Svalbard (Image: Getty)
It’s a remarkable destination which as many as 7,000 tourists flock to at a time – at once staggeringly beautiful and potentially dangerous to visit.
Longyearbyen is a tiny village in a remote collection of Norwegian islands just 500 miles south of the North Pole.
One of the northernmost settlements in the entire world, it is the capital of Svalbard and a coal mining town home to roughly 2,000 to 3,000 residents.
Known for its staggering Arctic landscape, its remote location and a plethora of wild animals from Arctic foxes to reindeer, the land is the last scrap of civilisation before the North Pole.
But in the administrative centre of the Norwegian Arctic archipelago, Longyearbyen, its scattering of residents don’t usually lock their houses or their cars either in the day or at night.
Polar bears are such a threat, tourists need armed guards (Image: Getty)
The horrifying reason is that people of Svalbard may need to make an emergency dash into a house or car to escape a wild polar bear. In fact, polar bear numbers outnumber humans here.
Travel website Kandoo Adventures says: “Interestingly people in Svalbard don’t lock their doors in case a hungry polar bear wanders into the town, ensuring anyone outside has the chance to seek refuge. Scary stuff.”
However, this tradition has begun to change in recent years thanks to the frequency of cruise ships arriving onshore, dumping up to 7,000 tourists at a time on the islands.
According to Responsible Travel, unfortunately many tourists have taken advantage of this custom to let themselves into people’s homes to gawp, treating the pretty town as a sort of living museum.
It says: “When a giant cruise ship docks in Longyearbyen, many residents lock their doors. This is against the norm, as the safety advice is for house and car doors to remain unlocked so that people have somewhere to escape to in the event of a polar bear wandering down the main street.
“However, the residents lock up because it is not unusual for the cruise passengers to wander into their houses and have a peek, like it is a folk park.
“Given the huge size of the ships and the tiny size of the town, when the tourists disembark they can double or triple the size of the population within minutes. The chances are, if you are reading this page, you would never dream of doing such a thing, but it is worth remembering that this unique place is home to people too.”
The place is so dangerous that all group trips to Spisbergen, in Svalbard, are accompanied by armed guides to protect against polar bear attacks.
Tourists heading there should also heed another warning – not to eat whale meat.
Norway remains one of the only countries in the world which violates the ban on hunting whales commercially. Up to 1,000 Minke whales are hunted and killed each year and their meat is served in Svalbard.
Responsible Travel adds: “We do not recommend eating it as it is a direct threat to whale species.”