Norway

Why Norway works

Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country occupying the western and northernmost part of the Scandinavian Peninsula, along with the remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the Svalbard archipelago. It shares a long eastern border with Sweden and borders Finland and Russia to the northeast, with an extensive coastline facing the Skagerrak strait, the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea; Oslo is the capital and largest city. The unified kingdom of Norway traces its founding to 872, making it one of the world's longest continuously existing states, and today has a population of about 5.6 million across 385,207 square kilometres.

Norwegian Viking explorers discovered Iceland by accident in the ninth century while sailing for the Faroe Islands, and later reached Vinland, present-day Newfoundland, in North America; tradition holds that Harald Fairhair unified Norway's many petty kingdoms into one realm in 872, after the Battle of Hafrsfjord near Stavanger. Christianity slowly replaced Norse tradition through the efforts of missionary kings including Olaf Tryggvasson and Olaf Haraldsson across the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, and Norway's thirteenth century is often remembered as a golden age of peace and expanding trade with the British Isles. Norway later existed in union first with Denmark, from 1537 to 1814, and then with Sweden until 1905, before full independence.

Norway's rugged coastline is broken by huge fjords and thousands of islands, stretching 28,953 kilometres along the mainland alone and estimated at more than 100,000 kilometres once every island is included; the country's high latitude produces dramatic seasonal daylight swings, with the sun never fully setting north of the Arctic Circle from late May to late July, and never rising there at all from late November to late January. Because of the Gulf Stream and prevailing westerlies, Norway is markedly warmer and wetter than its latitude would suggest, especially along the west coast, which bears the brunt of Atlantic storms, while areas east of the coastal mountains sit in a rain shadow with lower rainfall and snowfall.

Norway holds a greater variety of habitats than almost any other European country, home to an estimated 60,000 species across five terrestrial ecoregions, from Sarmatic mixed forest to Scandinavian montane birch forest; recorded wildlife includes around 450 bird species, 90 mammal species and some 16,000 species of insect, with roughly 40,000 species formally described by scientists to date. The Norwegian Shelf marine ecosystem is considered highly productive, supporting 45 freshwater and 150 saltwater fish species alongside thousands of invertebrate species in Norwegian waters.

Tourism contributed about 4.2 percent of Norway's GDP as of 2016, employing roughly one in fifteen people nationwide, with more than half of all visitors arriving between May and August; the country ranked 20th in the World Economic Forum's 2019 Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report. Norway's fjords, mountains and waterfalls in the west and north draw several hundred thousand foreign visitors a year, alongside cities such as Bergen, with its historic Bryggen wharf district, Trondheim's Nidaros Cathedral, and Oslo, home to both the Holmenkollen ski jump and the Vigeland sculpture park in Frogner Park.

• Norway — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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