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Set in an otherworldly landscape surrounded by glaciers, forests and lakes, this once-sleepy town has transformed into the ultimate gateway to the great outdoors.
The gumdrop-coloured lights, world maps and bamboo bar give Pangea the hip vibe of a beach bar in Mexico rather than a restaurant located 120km north of the Arctic Circle in Bodø, Norway. On a recent summer night, with the Sun still peeking through the clouds, smartly dressed couples and singles sat at outside tables eating Cuban sandwiches, drinking local craft beer and staring out at the cobalt blue Norwegian Sea.
A couple of Bodø-brewed Nordlands later, I stepped out onto the pedestrian-only Storgata street while the Sun sparkled off the sea and looked at my watch – it was 23:45. From early June to mid-July, the Sun barely sets in Bodø (pronounced “Buddha”), and as I followed the street from Bodø’s old town to the ultra-modern Stormen Concert Hall, not a single streetlight was on. In fact, at the recently opened Smarthotel – one of the many hotels fully booked most of this summer – my curtains were just slightly thinner than iron gates to block the midnight Sun.
Simen Steinbakk, Pangea’s 31-year-old manager, grew up in Bodø when it was the pit of Norwegian jokes. As he explained, Bodø didn’t have the hopping buzz of Tromsø, the university city to the north, or the cool confidence and culture of Oslo to the south. Instead, until 10 years ago, the town’s biggest claim to fame was its military air base, and it was known among Norwegians as “Boring Bodø”.
“The city has grown up,” Steinbakk said. “There are a lot more people, a lot more international people as well. A lot of the people who moved away from Bodø are starting to migrate back. You get people bringing in new industries. You get people bringing in new passions.”
Fast forward a decade and this once-sleepy 53,000-person town is one of the fastest-growing places in Norway. Stormen is drawing international artists, high-end restaurants are opening with postcard-worthy views of the sea and this year marks what is arguably Bodø’s greatest achievement: it was named a European Capital of Culture for 2024. In the 39-year history of the designation, Bodø is the first place located above the Arctic Circle to earn the accolade, and it and the surrounding Nordland region are putting on more than 1,000 performances, concerts, art exhibitions and events throughout the year highlighting its Indigenous history, cultural transformation and otherworldly Arctic landscapes.
Roughly 20,000 people filled Bodø’s streets on 3 February to mark the opening of its European Capital of Culture designation. In March, famed Norwegian jazz musician Hakon Erlandsen held a concert in Pluragrotta, a popular cave-diving destination located some 240km south of Bodø. The mustard-coloured Bodø City Museum, which opened in 1904, has been revamped to highlight the art and culture of Scandinavia’s Indigenous Sami people, who continue to live in and around Bodø. And on 22 June, some 4,500 people gathered at Breivika, the city beach, to watch the Midsummer Mystery folk festival and see traditional Sami games as bonfires flared. “Invisibility is the biggest issue we have,” said Maria Hernes Baer, a Sami wearing a traditional brown-and-red patterned dress in front of a lavvu (a teepee-like Sami tent), before adding that she hoped the festival would help educate Norwegians about Sami culture.
So, how did this small, Arctic town join a list of world-renowned cities like Paris, Istanbul and Prague to earn such an accolade?
Bodø is the capital of the Nordland region, a huge swath of land stretching nearly 800km along Norway’s north-west coast. This rugged 240,000-person expanse is the least-populated region in Norway and one of the most sparsely populated stretches in all of Europe, with fewer than seven people per square kilometre. But with its deeply carved fjords; nine national parks; Norway’s longest train ride – dubbed the “Arctic Circle Express“; and close proximity to Europe’s most accessible glacier, Nordland – and Bodø in particular – has always had the potential as an ideal base for an Arctic escape.
And so, 12 years ago Bodø came up with a strategy.
“We call it ‘Artic,'” Bodø mayor Odd Emil Ingebrigtsen told me, wearing a pin with the town symbol (a bright orange midnight Sun) on his lapel. “It’s wordplay between ‘Arctic’ and ‘articulate’. The thing is to get people to meet and hopefully people are proud of their city and their regional county here. And also get a little bit [of] attention from Europe. So, when people meet, things can happen … magic things can happen.”
Buoyed by its Capital of Culture designation, the plan seems to be working. According to Innovation Norway and Statistics Norway the number of visitors to the Bodø area is up 25% so far in 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, and reservations in its growing number of restaurants (many of which feature Bodø’s trademark tørrfisk stockfish) are booming.
“The only thing I know is hotel owners and taxi owners are just thrilled,” Ingebrigtsen told me. I met Ingebrigtsen in his office on the top floor of the Bodø Town Hall, built in 2019 as part of the town’s rejuvenation efforts. He grew up in Bodø, prowling his parents’ bookstore and oblivious to the sleepy town apparently boring people around him.
“It’s been a big transformation here,” Ingebrigtsen said. “Just in 10-12 years, it’s a totally different scheme. You get a lot of fresh seafood. Twelve years ago, it could be a problem because they all served pizzas and kebabs and hamburgers.”
According to Ingebrigtsen, Bodø’s rise from Scandinavian obscurity ironically began when the town’s military air base closed in 2012, which cost it 1,000 jobs. “Never miss a good crisis,” Ingebrigtsen joked.
Blessed with an abundance of crystalline lakes, dense forests and the towering Saltfjellet mountain range, the local government went to work developing Bodø’s infrastructure as a sleek gateway to the great outdoors. In 2014 the city built the snow-white, 900-seat Stormen Concert Hall, which features some of the world’s best acoustics for classical music. That same year, it also built the Stormen Library and Cultural Center, whose floor-to-ceiling windows with panoramic views of the sea won the Norwegian Award for Building Design.
A few years later, the town commissioned another concert hall, the Svømmehallen Scene, where the Norwegian pop group A-ha (“Take On Me”)recorded its last album. The Jekt Museum, displaying the kind of fishing boats that transported stockfish up the coast, was built in 2019 and won the Norwegian Museum of the Year award this year. Norway’s Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development named Bodø as the nation’s most attractive city in 2016, and a new stadium for its powerhouse FK Bodø/Glimt club and a new airport are set to be completed in 2029 and 2030, respectively.
“I was a student in Tromsø,” said Hanne Kristin Jakhelin, who moved to Bodø in 1998 and owns the consulting firm Muskat AS. “Coming from a student city, Bodø was very quiet. Bodø had empty streets. They had quite a lot of not-very-taken-care-of buildings. There wasn’t much to do for young people. Now it’s totally different.”
Infrastructure and architecture aside, one of the other factors fuelling Bodø’s growth is its emergence as an IT centre. The town’s population has jumped more than 20% in the last 18 years, but there are plenty of opportunities to escape into nature.
On the third day of my visit, I took a bus to the village of Festvag where I hopped a free 10-minute ferry across a small fjord to the town of Misten. A short bus ride later, I was in the 350-person community of Kjerringøy, surrounded by forests and mountains. Every other summer since 2007, artists from around the world travel here to live in the wilderness and make art out of whatever they see in nature (sans tools) as part of the Kjerringoy Land Art Biennale – Europe’s only land art biennale.
A shorter trip is just nine kilometers south-east of Bodø. Saltstraumen is known as the world’s strongest maelstrom, and its 110 billion gallons of water shoot through a three-kilometre straight every six hours. Elsewhere, Moysalen National Park features fjords and snow-capped peaks rising from the ocean more than 1,200m. And if you don’t happen to visit during the months of midnight Sun, chances are you may spot the Northern Lights from all over Bodø and its environs.
As the midnight Sun continues this summer, so will Bodø’s Capital of Culture programming. On 25-28 July, the Márkomeannu festival will highlight Sami art, culture and music in a series of performances and seminars. Norwegian singer-songwriter Thomas Dybdahl will play his new album at the Stormen on 5 August, and the venue will hold the Eurovision Young Musicians contest (billed as classical music’s version of the famous Eurovision Song Contest) on 17 August.
Bodø may have shed its “boring” image, but officials hope that the momentum of this year’s Capital of Culture designation continues into the future.
“Our tourist businesses are not as good as other places, but it will come,” Ingebrigtsen said. “We [are already feeling] the effects.”
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