74,048 views
https://www.france.tv/france-3/thalassa/ "It's my 18th birthday present! It's the total dream, sublime!" Rémy is "enchanted" by Spitsbergen, dazzled by this territory made of glaciers and mountains at the gateway to the Arctic Ocean. There's reason to be! Here you'll find the largest concentration of polar bears in the world, walruses, seals, and hundreds of colonies of seabirds. A sign of the times, the warming of the waters by the Gulf Stream has made the archipelago accessible by sea for a large part of the year. Following in the footsteps of the young Frenchman, we board the "Nordstjernen", a small expedition ship that takes tourists as close as possible to the coast until its old rounded hull rubs against the ice of the pack ice. Among the 60,000 tourists that visit the archipelago each year, only the luckiest will see the master of the place, the polar bear… But all will contribute to the survival of Spitsbergen. Because tourism, described here as “sustainable”, has become the new vein, the only one capable of taking over from a century of mining of which there are still some vestiges that are worth the detour! A report by Ramon Gutierrez and Nicolas Vrignon An FTV Thalassa production