, , or is a village in Gáivuotna Municipality (also known as ''Kåfjord Municipality'') in

Troms Troms (; ; ; ) is a Counties of Norway, county in northern Norway. It borders Finnmark county to the northeast and Nordland county in the southwest. Norrbotten Län in Sweden is located to the south and further southeast is a shorter border with ...

county,

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard also form part of the Kingdom of ...

. The village is located along the Kåfjordelva river () at the end of the Kåfjorden in the Kåfjorddalen valley. The whole area around the end of the fjord is called ''Kåfjordbotn'' (). The village has a population (2023) of 231 and a

population density Population density (in agriculture: Standing stock (disambiguation), standing stock or plant density) is a measurement of population per unit land area. It is mostly applied to humans, but sometimes to other living organisms too. It is a key geog ...

of . Birtavarre is located along

European route E6 European route E6 (, , or simply E6) is the main north–south thoroughfare through Norway as well as the west coast of Sweden. It is long and runs from the southern tip of Sweden at Trelleborg, into Norway and through almost all of the countr ...

about southeast of the municipal centre of Olderdalen (on the north side of the fjord) and about southeast of Samuelsberg and Manndalen (on the south side of the fjord). Birtavarre Chapel is also located in the village.

Name

Birtavarre is an old mining town with smelters in Ankerlia that are preserved by the Nord-Troms Museum. It was during the mining period that the village adopted the name ''Birtavarre''. Up until that time the area had been called ''Kåfjordbotn'', meaning the end of the Kåfjorden. Since there was also mining in the village of Kåfjord in the nearby

Alta Municipality Alta (; ; ; ) is the most populated List of municipalities of Norway, municipality in Finnmark Counties of Norway, county, Norway. The administrative centre of the municipality is the Alta (town), town of Alta. Some of the main villages in the ...

, many workers ended up in the wrong Kåfjord. The name was changed simply for the practical reason of avoiding confusion. The present name for the village comes from the nearby mountain ''Pirttivaara'' which derives from an old

Kven language Kven ( or ; or ; or ; ) is a Finnic language or a group of Finnish dialects spoken in the northernmost parts of Norway by the Kven people. For political and historical reasons, it received the status of a minority language in 2005 within the ...

name.

References

{{authority control Gáivuotna–Kåfjord Villages in Troms Populated places of Arctic Norway