Vilhelmina Municipality (; ) is a

municipality A municipality is usually a single administrative division having municipal corporation, corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate. The term ''municipality' ...

Västerbotten County Västerbotten County (), sometimes called Westrobothnia, is a county or '' län'' in the north of Sweden. It shares the borders with the counties of Västernorrland, Jämtland, and Norrbotten, as well as the Norwegian county of Nordland and the ...

in northern

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic count ...

. Its

seat A seat is a place to sit. The term may encompass additional features, such as back, armrest, head restraint but may also refer to concentrations of power in a wider sense (i.e " seat (legal entity)"). See disambiguation. Types of seat The ...

is located in Vilhelmina.

History

In 1804 the

parish A parish is a territorial entity in many Christianity, Christian denominations, constituting a division within a diocese. A parish is under the pastoral care and clerical jurisdiction of a priest#Christianity, priest, often termed a parish pries ...

of Volgsjö was renamed Vilhelmina in honour of Queen Frederica Dorothea Wilhelmina of Sweden. In 1947 the locality Vilhelmina was detached from the rural municipality with the same name, forming the market town (''

köping ''Köping'' was a Swedish denomination for a market town since the Middle Ages, derived from the Old Norse word '' kaupang''. The designation was officially abolished with the municipal reform of 1971, when Sweden was subdivided into the Munic ...

'') of Vilhelmina. The two entities were reunited in 1965.

Geography

Like the rest of northern Sweden (''

Norrland Norrland (, , originally ''Norrlanden'', meaning 'the Northlands') is the northernmost, largest and least populated of the three traditional lands of Sweden, consisting of nine provinces. Although Norrland does not serve any administrative p ...

''), it is scarcely populated due to its inhospitable conditions and cold climate, but is superb for those who like wildlife and untouched nature.

Localities

There is only one locality (or urban area) in Vilhelmina Municipality:Statistics Sweden as of December 31, 2005
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Demographics

This is a demographic table based on Vilhelmina Municipality's electoral districts in the

2022 Swedish general election General elections were held in Sweden on 11 September 2022 to elect the 349 members of the Riksdag who in turn elected the Prime Minister of Sweden. Under the constitution, regional and municipal elections were also held on the same day. The pr ...

sourced from SVT's election platform, in turn taken from SCB official statistics. In total there were 6,473 residents, including 5,093 Swedish citizens of voting age. 51.6% voted for the left coalition and 46.7% for the right coalition. Indicators are in percentage points except population totals and income.

Culture

Every July the town of Vilhelmina holds a festival called ''Hembygdsdagarna Vilhelmina''. In addition to popular and folk music performances, tradition holds that a local engaged couple is selected each year to get married during the festival. The bride and groom lead a parade of fiddlers and other traditionally dressed Swedes through town to the church where the marriage is performed in front of all who wish to attend. They are not always able to find a couple willing to get married, however, so some years they hold the parade without an engaged couple, and hold a public church service instead of a wedding.

References

External links

Vilhelmina Municipality
- Official site

from Nordisk familjebok, 1921
''Vilhelmina – An Adventure''
- Tourism

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

file
Live webcam in Vilhelmina
{{authority control Municipalities of Västerbotten County