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Arctic Yearbook 2014
Figure 1: The Arctic areas in Europe as referred to in this study: large parts of Iceland, Greenland and Faroe Islands,
and northern parts of North Ireland, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Source: The EU Northern
Periphery Programme, retrieved from www.northernperiphery.eu, 2014.
Gunnarsbyn, the setting of this study, is a small community in
Norrbotten, northern Sweden (Figure 2). It is located close to the polar
circle where it is usually covered with snow from November till March,
continued by the spring-winter referred to as the best time of the year
by locals. Summers are relatively short but warm. A small population
spread over large territories is descriptive for the north of Sweden. The
town of Gunnarsbyn has 157 inhabitants located in Boden municipality
where 27,500 people are spread over 4,300 km2, a density of 7 people
per km2 (SMCLRA 2011). Out of Sweden’s 53.7 million overnight stays
in 2013, 2.15 million of these were in Norrbotten. Although this
number does not seem like a lot, the overnight stays in Norrbotten
have increased by 13% since 2008, which is significant compared to the
national increase of 7% (Statistics Sweden 2014). It could be assumed
that Norrbotten has premium conditions for development as a tourist
destination all year round. But despite small scale tourism activities,
tourist hosts in Gunnarsbyn need to adapt to the municipal, national
Figure 2: Location of case
and global conditions of the tourism industry.
study, Gunnarsbyn.
Source: SMCLRA (2011).
Sweden is, according to the 2013 Travel and Tourism
Competitiveness Report, the 9th most competitive country for
tourism (out of 140). The T&TC index consists of 14 pillars,
whereof Sweden’s highest score is in ‘environmental sustainability’ (ranks number 1 out of 140), but
Kristjánsdóttir