Odda has been populated for centuries, but in the 19th century, Odda became a significant tourist destination, and it was the centre of Odda Municipality. Visits ranged from English pioneers around 1830 to German EmperorKaiser Wilhelm II, who visited Odda every year between 1891 and 1914. This led to the construction of several hotels in the town. Some of the main tourist attractions around Odda include the Buarbreen glacier, the nearby Folgefonna glacier, and the Hardangervidda plateau. The present Odda is a modern town which grew up around smelters built at the head of the Sørfjorden branch of the main Hardangerfjorden in the mid-twentieth century, drawing migrants from different parts of Norway. The carbide production and the subsequent production of cyanamide was started in 1908 after the hydroelectric power plant was built in nearby Tyssedal. The power plant provided the necessary electricity for the arc furnaces. The plant was the largest in the world and remained operational until 2003 when the plant was closed and sold to Philipp Brothers Chemicals Inc. The Norwegian government tried to get the site recognized together with other industrial plants as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2010, an international report stated: What makes Odda smelteverk so important and central to the application of Norway’s hydro power sites and pioneer chemical industry as a World Heritage Site is the fact that here in an internationally unique way the physical remains of an early chemical production process are still present. In 2020, Odda Municipality was merged into the newly enlarged Ullensvang Municipality.
Dialect
The town of Odda grew up around this smelter in the early-twentieth century, drawing migrants from different parts of Norway. As a result, there developed a new dialect, a mixture of that spoken in the home regions of the migrants—a phenomenon termed by linguists "a Koiné language". Odda and the neighboring village of Tyssedal provided valuable insights to linguists studying this phenomenon. The researcher Paul Kerswill conducted an intensive study of the Norwegian spoken in the two communities, relating them to very different geographical origins: The workers in Odda came predominantly from western Norway. In Tyssedal only about one third came from western Norway; one third came from eastern Norway; and the rest from other parts of the country. The dialects that evolved in these two communities were radically different from each other, though spoken at a short geographical distance from each other.
