Kristiansand () is a city located within Kristiansand Municipality in Agder county, Norway. The city is the administrative centre of both Kristiansand Municipality and Agder county. The city sits along the southern coast of Norway, along the Skagerrak.
The city has a population (2025) of and a population density of . This means that Kristiansand ranks the 8th largest urban area in Norway. Due to its size, the city is divided into several subdivisions called boroughs: Kvadraturen, Grim, Lund, Vågsbygd, and Oddernes. These boroughs are also sub-divided into smaller districts. Outside of the city of Kristiansand (and within Kristiansand Municipality), there are two other boroughs called Songdalen and Søgne which are much more rural than the city itself. Songdalen and Søgne became part of Kristiansand Municipality in 2020.
The city of Kristiansand is located on four main roads: the European route E18 highway goes to the northeast and connects to Arendal, Porsgrunn, Drammen, and Oslo the European route E39 highways goes to the west and connects to Mandal, Flekkefjord, Sandnes, and Stavanger (and on along the west coast of Norway) Norwegian National Road 9 goes to the northwest and connects to Vennesla, Evje, and the Setesdal valley Norwegian National Road 41 goes to the north and connects to Kristiansand Airport, Kjevik, Tveit, Birkeland, northern Agder, and Telemark
The city of Kristiansand is a very popular place for tourists, especially during the summer season. Kristiansand Zoo and Amusement Park is the largest zoo in Norway, and it lies just east of the city. It receives over 900,000 visitors every year. Markens Street is the main pedestrian street in downtown Kristiansand, with lots of shops and restaurants. Bystranda is a city beach located in Kvadraturen; Hamresanden beach is the longest beach in Kristiansand, located just east of the city, near the airport. Hamresanden Camping is a popular family activity during the summer season. The city hosts a free weekly concert in downtown Kristiansand in the summertime. Outside the city is the industrial park Sørlandsparken, which includes Sørlandssenteret, Norway's largest mall.
Name The city (and municipality) is named after the King Christian IV, who founded the city on 5 July 1641. The second part of the city's name, sand, comes from the Old Norse word which means "sand" or "sandy ground". This refers to the sandy headland upon which the city was originally built.
Historically, the name was usually written Christianssand until 1877, although the map of the mapmaker Pontoppidan from 1785 spelled the name Christiansand (with a single 's'). In 1877, an official spelling reform aimed at bringing city names into line with regular Norwegian orthography (using a K instead of a Ch) changed the name to Kristianssand (the cities of Kristiansund and Kristiania also had their spellings changed under the same reform). Despite this change, a number of businesses and associations retain the "Ch" spelling. The name was again changed to its present form, Kristiansand (single "s"), in 1889.
In 2012, the mayor of Kristiansand Municipality, Arvid Grundekjøn, proposed that the city be renamed Christianssand, arguing that "Kristiansand" is grammatically meaningless and that Christianssand stands for tradition. This proposal was not well received by the locals and the mayor has not pushed this further.
History
Prehistory and early history The Kristiansand area has been inhabited since prehistoric times. In 1996, the well-preserved skeleton of a woman dating to approximately 6500 BC was discovered in Søgne, just west of the city of Kristiansand. This demonstrates very early habitation of the archipelago. Grauthelleren (Grathelleren), located on Fidjane, is believed to be a Stone Age settlement. The first discovery in Norway of a Sarup enclosure (a Neolithic form of ritual enclosure first identified at Sarup on the Danish island of Funen) was made in 2010 at Hamresanden and dates to c. 3400 BC. Archaeological excavations to the east of Oddernes Church have uncovered rural settlements that existed during the centuries immediately before and after the start of the common era. Together with a corresponding discovery in Rogaland, these settlements are unique in the Norwegian context; isolated farms, rather than villages, were the norm in ancient Norway. Other discoveries in grave mounds around the church, in the Lund section of the city, indicate habitation beginning c. 400 AD, and 25 cooking pits that were found immediately outside the church wall in 1907 are probably even older. One of the largest pre-Christian burial grounds in South Norway was formerly located to the south and west of the church. A royal centre is thought to have existed at Oddernes before 800, and the church was built around 1040.
Before the stone church was built, one or perhaps two wooden post churches are believed to have stood on the same spot. A few years ago, excavations were carried out under and around the runestone when it was moved to the church porch; the grave finds indicated that the churchyard must already have been unusually large in the High Middle Ages. This means that the area must have had a large population before it was reduced by the Black Death.
In the 14th and 15th centuries, there was already a busy port and a small village on the Otra at the lowest point of today's Lund neighbourhood (Lahelle). Another important element in the development of Kristiansand was the harbor on the island of Flekkerøy, which was the most important on the Skagerrak beginning in the 16th century and was first fortified under King Christian III in 1555. In 1635, King Christian IV ordered his feudal seigneur, Palle Rosenkrantz, to move from Nedenes and build a royal palace on the island.
Foundation to 1900
Christian IV (renowned for having founded many towns) visited the location in 1630 and 1635, and on 5 July 1641 formally founded the town of Christianssand on the "sand" on the opposite bank of the Torridalselva (Otra). The town was laid out in Renaissance style on a grid plan (the central section now known as Kvadraturen = The Quarters), and merchants throughout Agder were commanded to move to the new town. In return, they were to receive a variety of trading privileges and a ten-year tax exemption.
In 1666, Christianssand became a garrison town and was heavily fortified. In 1682, King Christian V decided to relocate the bishopric there from Stavanger. Hence, the young city became the main city of the Christiansands stift (diocese) for the Church of Norway.
Christianssand experienced its first fire in 1734, which was devastating to the city. Later in the 18th century, after the American Revolutionary War, the town's shipbuilders experienced an economic boom that lasted until the Napoleonic Wars, which struck a severe blow to Kristiansand's overseas trade. Denmark–Norway supported France in the conflict, and as a result Norwegian ports including Kristiansand were blockaded by the Royal Navy, as recounted in Henrik Ibsen's Terje Vigen. By the 1830s, the town's economy began to rebound, and the growth in the Norwegian shipping industry was important for Kristiansand. It was the only part of Norway where oak trees flourished, a major resource for the country's shipbuilding industry. Large numbers of lobsters were collected off the coast and sent to London during the mid-19th century. The population of Kristiansand was about 12,000 people by 1848.
On 1 January 1838, the new formannskapsdistrikt law went into effect. This new law granted municipal self-government to every parish (prestegjeld) and city throughout Norway. As a city, it formed its own municipal government (Kristiansand Municipality) and it was surrounded by the rural Oddernes Municipality.
The city of Kristiansand had a quarantine station for maritime traffic and hospital at Odderøya for cholera patients that opened in 1804. The city had far fewer deaths than the surrounding area, largely attributable to the quarantine station and the hospital. For example, during the period of 1833–1866, Drammen had 544 cholera patients, of which 336 died. During this same period, Kristiansand only experienced 15 deaths from cholera.
Another important development during the 19th century was the foundation in 1881 of Sindssygeasyl, the second central psychiatric institution in Norway (after Gaustad). The psychiatric hospital drew highly specialized doctors to the city and also provided many jobs for women.
The most recent major fire, in 1892, left half the original section of the city in ashes. It burned buildings as far as the cathedral, which had been rebuilt in brick after a previous fire in 1880.
1900 onward With the development of hydropower in southern Norway, the city gradually developed an industrial base, particularly with the establishment in 1910 of the nickel refinery Kristiansands Nikkelraffineringsverk AS (later Falconbridge Nikkelverk, now Glencore Nikkelverk). From an economic perspective, the First World War was a good time for Kristiansand, as a neutral shipping city. The crises that followed with the gold standard politics of the 1920s and the world economic crisis of the 1930s were also deeply felt in a trading city like Kristiansand.
On 1 July 1921, the city of Kristiansand got larger by annexing a part of the neighboring Oddernes Municipality, gaining 2,164 more residents along with much more land for the growing city.
The labour movement had important pioneers in the city, and Leon Trotsky spent about a year of his exile in the archipelago offshore from Kristiansand. Arnulf Øverland took him from the nearby Randesund Municipality to Ny-Hellesund in the nearby Søgne Municipality in 1936. In the interwar period Kristiansand was a centre for intellectuals, especially after the architect Thilo Schoder settled there in 1932.
The city of Kristiansand was attacked by German naval forces and the Luftwaffe during the Operation Weserübung on 9 April 1940. The naval forces met fierce resistance from Norwegian coastal artillery at Odderøya. Bombs and grenades also hit the downtown and the 70 meter high church tower of the Kristiansand Cathedral was hit by accident. The third attack attempt on the city succeeded because a signal flag was confused with a French national flag and the misunderstanding was not discovered until it was too late. The city was occupied by a force of 800 men.
During the 1960s, there were many municipal mergers across Norway due to the work of the Schei Committee. On 1 January 1965, the following areas were merged to form a much larger Kristiansand Municipality which included the city center and large rural areas surrounding the city: all of Kristiansand Municipality (population: ) all of Oddernes Municipality (population: ) all of Randesund Municipality (population: ) all of Tveit Municipality (population: )
Post-war construction in the city included further development of the borough of Lund, and in the 1960s and 1970s the borough of Vågsbygd to the west was developed into a section with 20,000 inhabitants. In the 1980s, industry and business in the city declined, in part because of the 1986 fire at the Hotel Caledonien. But beginning in the second half of the 1990s, business increased in momentum with the development of enterprises for marine and offshore equipment, security technology and drilling.
The older municipal archives for Kristiansand (and the former municipalities) are currently held at the Inter-Municipal Archives in Vest-Agder (IKAVA). This includes documents concerning, for example, local councils, chairmanships, poor boards, school boards and archives including among other things personal documents in the form of client records, tax records, and also school records.