The island where you aren’t allowed to die or be born

POSTCARD FROM | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA

Jamie Sharp explores the mysterious Arctic island of Svalbard, which sits at the extreme edge of Norway's territory and has only a handful of settlements. Arriving during the 'midnight sun' in August, when daylight never ends, he discovers a wild and inhospitable archipelago with extraordinary natural beauty. 

BY JAMIE SHARP | CABANA TRAVEL | 4 SEPTEMBER 2025

Svalbard sits high in the Arctic Circle, at the extreme edge of Norway’s territory, where the tilt of the Earth coincides with latitude to produce two great phenomena: the midnight sun and the polar night. From mid-April to late August, the sun never sets, and from late October to mid-February, it never rises.

Visiting The Arctic is as close to going to another planet as one can get without leaving our earth. In summer, devoid of ice, the landscape is almost lunar, totally devoid of trees. There are only a handful of settlements on this inhospitable archipelago. One, Barentsburg, is Russian, and is still an active coal-mining town, home to the northernmost statue of Lenin in the world. It is also one of the last places where Norwegians and Russians live side by side under a kind of frozen détente.

I arrived in August, during the ‘midnight sun’ when daylight is unending. I found that time can lose its meaning without the delineation of day and night. In winter, locals told me that the pendulum swings to the other extreme. The sun doesn’t rise for months, and often working outside with head torches in the darkness, the conditions can result in real mental strain. You aren’t allowed to buy a lot of alcohol during winter in Svalbard, “you can have a beer after work, but we all keep an eye on what the other is drinking because it can be a dark path” says our boat captain.

The island is rich in natural resources, and thus is governed by a bizarre international status. The Svalbard Treaty, signed in Paris over a century ago, grants equal rights of residence, access, and commercial activity to citizens of more than forty nations, including the UK, USA, Russia, and China.

Longyearbyen, where I stayed, is Norwegian. It sits in a valley carved over millennia by glaciers, with rows of colourful miners’ houses on stilts lining a single main road. Beyond the town limits — marked by signs warning of polar bears — it is illegal to travel without a rifle. As glaciers melt at an accelerating pace, hungry bears are wandering closer to human settlements in search of food. Here, you leave your house and car unlocked, in case someone needs to take shelter quickly. The town takes its name from an American businessman who arrived in 1906 to start a coal company which, until only a few weeks ago, was still mining black gold from beneath the permafrost.

Under Norwegian law, one isn’t allowed to die in Svalbard. The old and seriously ill have to leave for the mainland in good time. The reason lies in the permafrost, which has a freeze–thaw cycle that pushes things back to the surface, making burials unsafe. There is one small cemetery that dates to the early 20th century, a scattering of white crosses marking the graves of early explorers, many of whom died during the Spanish flu. Scientists have even recovered live samples of the 1918 virus from bodies preserved here.

On the outskirts of Longyearbyen, built deep into the flank of a mountain, is a brutalist steel-and-glass doorway glows in the polar light. This is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, sometimes called the “Doomsday Vault”. Inside, permafrost and refrigeration keep millions of seeds in suspended life: rice from the Mekong Delta, wheat from the American plains, maize from Africa. It is a back-up of the world’s plant life, designed to survive war, flood, plague, even the collapse of nations.

In 2015, the vault was used for the first time after a request came in from scientists in Aleppo. Syria’s seed bank had been destroyed during the bombing, and its researchers needed to replant lost varieties - the only surviving samples were in Svalbard. From deep within the frozen arctic, chickpeas, lentils, and wheat were sent back to be grown again in the dryness of the Levant, giving life to fields thousands of miles away.

As the polar ice itself begins to melt, the survival of life elsewhere may one day depend on what is preserved here in the cold. It’s a place where the enormity and fragility of the natural world, to which so few of us feel connected anymore, comes into focus.