Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Longyearbyen is the largest settlement on Svalbard, with about 1,500 inhabitants. The Governor of Svalbard resides here. The settlement was founded in in 1906 by John Munru Longyear, main owner of the Arctic Coal Company of Boston. It was destroyed by the Germans in 1943 and rebuilt after the war. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.