Bergen, historically Bjørgvin, is a city and municipality in Vestland county on the west coast of Norway. The city centre and northern neighbourhoods are on Byfjorden, ‘the city fjord’, and the city is surrounded by mountains. Bergen is an international center for aquaculture, shipping, the offshore petroleum industry and subsea technology, and a national centre for higher education, media and tourism.
About Bergen, Norway in brief
Bergen, historically Bjørgvin, is a city and municipality in Vestland county on the west coast of Norway. The city centre and northern neighbourhoods are on Byfjorden, ‘the city fjord’, and the city is surrounded by mountains. Bergen is an international center for aquaculture, shipping, the offshore petroleum industry and subsea technology, and a national centre for higher education, media, tourism and finance. From December to March, Bergen can be, in rare cases, up to 20 °C warmer than Oslo, even though both cities are at about 60° North. The Bergen School of Meteorology was developed at the Geophysical Institute starting in 1917, the Norwegian School of Economics was founded in 1936, and the University of Bergen was established in 1946. The main football team is SK Brann and the buekorps is a unique tradition of the city. The principal export from the northern Norwegian coast, which started around 1100, was cod, which was the main reason that the city became one of the largest centres for trade in North Europe. It was the largest city in Norway until the 1830s when it was overtaken by the capital, Christiania. What remains of the quays, Bryggen, are a World Heritage Site. The town is home to Bergen Airport, Flesland and Bergen Light Rail, and is the terminus of the Bergen Line. Four large bridges connect Bergen to its suburban municipalities. The municipality covers 465 square kilometres and is on the peninsula of Bergenshalvøyen.
It is the administrative centre of Vestland County and the capital city of Hordaland county. It served as Norway’s capital in the 13th century, and became a bureau city of the Hanseatic League. From 1831 to 1972, Ber gen was its own county. In 1972, the municipality absorbed four surrounding municipalities and became part of Hordsaland County. It has a mild winter climate, though with a lot of precipitation, and can be up to 15°C colder than Oslo in the winter months. The German city of Low, where German merchants lived in their own quarter of the Middle East, was a separate town, where the city was one of North Europe’s largest centres of trade in the 1020s or 1030s. The cathedral was the site of the first royal coronation in Norway in the 1150s, and continued to host royal coronations throughout the13th century. It had already been present since the 1240s, but the functions of the capitalCity were lost to Oslo during the reign of King Haakon V. In the middle of the 14th Century, North German merchants who lived in the northern coast, founded one four Kontore of Norway in Bergen, which had already traded from the Norwegian coast from the 1100s to the 1300s. It became the first city where a rudimentary central administration was established. In the 17th century Bergen had exclusive rights to mediate trade between Northern Norway and abroad and it was the centre of the trade in Norway.
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This page is based on the article Bergen, Norway published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
