Hammerfest Webcam. Panorama
Hammerfest is a city in the far north of Norway with a population of 9.2 thousand people, the center of the municipality of the same name. Hammerfest received city status on July 7, 1789 and since then has been the most northern city in the world. This, of course, is a rather relative regalia - there are settlements to the north (Tiksi, for example), but all of them do not have urban status.
The port of Hammerfest is considered one of the best in Northern Norway. The first settlement appeared here in the period from 1250 to 1350. The name of the city comes from two words - "hamarr", which means "steep rocky surface" in Norwegian, and "festr" - "rope for mooring ships. The city owes its origins to trade with the Russian Pomors - it is through the local ice-free port thanks to the Gulf Stream has long passed caravans from Arkhangelsk with the Russian grain.
In 1789 Hammerfest was declared a town, and at the same time the Hanseatic city of Bergen, with its monopoly of trade in Norway, forbade trade with the Pomors in the far north. Then the locals, who for centuries had learned the skills of whaling and polar bear hunting from the Russian northerners, became more and more active in these trades, and over time Hammerfest from a trading town turned into the hunting center of the Norwegian polar regions.
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the city began to be called the "polar capital of Norway. Hammerfest was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War, and in the postwar years has become one of the major centers of fishing and fishing industry in Norway. A new era in the development of the city came in the early 80s, when the nearby Hammerfest began actively developing Snohvit gas field, located at a depth of 340 meters and has proven reserves of 160 billion cubic meters of natural gas.
At the same time that development began on the island of Melkoya opposite Hammerfest, construction of a large gas-processing facility began, and Hammerfest became one of Norway's largest gas centers. The Norwegian company Statoil is the operator of the field and the complex.
