Welcome to Kongsberg!
Kongsberg is a town in Buskerud. It is an old mining community that developed around the rich silver mines in the 1600s. Today the town is a high-tech center in Norway and the mines are now only a great sight for visitors. Kongsberg is the gate to the great Numedal valley. There is also a nice winter sports resort in the hills of Kongsberg. (Not to be confused with Kaliningrad, formerly known as Königsberg).
Kongsberg is a historical mining town and municipality in Buskerud, Viken county, Norway. The city is located on the river Numedalslågen at the entrance to the valley of Numedal. Kongsberg has been a center of silver mining, arms production, and forestry for centuries, and is the site of the high technology industry including the headquarters of Norway's largest defense contractor Kongsberg Gruppen.
Kongsberg, formerly spelled Konningsberg (lit. "King's Mountain"), was developed as a mining city on the basis of the Kongsberg Silver Mines, founded by and named after King Christian IV of Denmark and Norway in 1624. The king invited German engineers and other specialists from Saxony and the Harz region to help build the mining company. As a mining city, Kongsberg had a distinct urban culture that contrasted with its surroundings, strongly influenced by the traditions of mining communities in Germany and where the German language was extensively used in the mining business and for religious services. In the first years, nearly half of the city's population were German immigrants, and the majority of the engineers and executives were German immigrants and their descendants well into the 19th century, becoming a distinct social class called mining families that formed the educated social elite of Kongsberg in contrast to the Norwegian farming population, the first Nobel laureate in economics Ragnar Frisch belonged to such a Kongsberg mining family. By the 18th century, Kongsberg was Norway's second-largest city, second only to Bergen. Kongsberg was one of Norway's two privileged mining cities and thus formed a special mining jurisdiction (Norwegian: Bergstad), and only became part of Buskerud county in 1760. On 1 January 1838, the new national law, creating local governments, made Kongsberg a municipality. The rural municipalities of Ytre Sandsvær and Øvre Sandsvær were merged into the municipality of Kongsberg in 1964. Kongsberg gradually lost importance to other cities in the 19th century, particularly to the rapidly growing capital of Christiania (Oslo).
The Kongsberg Silver Mines closed in 1958 after operating for 334 years and is today a museum and the city's main tourist attraction. Kongsberg remains the site of the Royal Norwegian Mint (Norwegian: Det Norske Myntverket), which mints Norwegian coins and also produces circulating and collectors' coins for other countries. Kongsberg is also the home of Norway's major defense contractor, Kongsberg Gruppen, founded in 1814. Two of its best-known products were the Kongsberg Colt and the Krag–Jørgensen rifle. Both the University of South-Eastern Norway Kongsberg campus, and Tinius Olsen's school, a combined technical vocational college and secondary school, are located in Kongsberg.