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On June 25, 1888, a fire started in Umea and burned until nearly everything was gone. At least 2,300 of the city's 3,000 inhabitants lost their homes in a matter of hours. The reconstruction was thorough and deliberate: wide avenues to act as firebreaks, and nearly 3,000 silver birch trees planted along them to create the city's enduring character. The birches are still there, still silver, still marking the city's grid, and 'the City of Birches' has been Umea's identity ever since. The name does not feel like tourism promotion because it is simply accurate.

Umea University was founded in 1965 and changed the city completely.

Where it had been a small northern Swedish market town, it became a university city, attracting students and researchers and the cultural density that follows. Emmanuelle Charpentier, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing CRISPR gene-editing technology, did the key research here. The city now grows by roughly a thousand residents a year and has an unusually young population for a Swedish city this far north. In 2014, Umea was a European Capital of Culture.