The Midnight sun smoulders warmly above Levi’s fells. I walk barefoot and naked out of a 95 °C plus sauna, my skin is steaming, my sweat dripping and oozing from all pores. I am ready for skinny-dip salvation.
In Finnish Lapland, the clock is a liar. During the Midsummer period, the sun simply loops the sky for forty-six nights straight, like a bright, playful dog chasing its tail. Reindeer clop across bike lanes, people fish at 2 a.m., forget to sleep at all, and grown men high-five each other in T-shirts that read Sauna Is My Church. Levi rides that delirious light like a funfair carousel – spinning, sparkling, refusing to let you off.
I came north to sweat. But you can’t talk sauna here without stepping into Sámi story time. ‘Scratch the lichen on any boulder and you’ll find a myth,’ says Janne, one of our guides, while walking to the top of a fell around midnight. Beaivi, the sun goddess, painting saplings gold; Bieggolmmái, wind-man, rattling spruce tops; benevolent Saivo spirits, hiding in double-bottomed lakes.
The modern Finn may carry an iPhone, yet the land still hums with animism – especially when the stove glows red or during midsummer when all these spirits seem to dance between the trees and all around you in the midsummer night sun, whispering in your ear.
Lapland is a place of water: rivers, swamps, streams, waterfalls and lakes. For my first sweat session, I embark on a ferry-sauna – think barge meets backyard deck, bobbing on Sirkajärvi, the Lake of Sirkka. Sirkka is the town right next to Levitunturi, the 531 metres high fell that gives the area and the ski resort its name.
‘Steam is a reset button,’ says Mika Kuusela, founder of Kinos Safaris and local fixer who has dragged half the planet onto snowmobiles. ‘You cook the stress out, then ice-shock what’s left. After that, beer tastes holy.’ Mika laughs.
I enter the narrow wood-fired box on the boat, with a belly full of fire-kissed pancakes and an ice-cold Lapin Kulta beer. Life is good. Life is hot. I add more chunks of wood into the little, yet effective, furnace. While I’m slowly destressing, clouds muscle in, and rain hammers the lake with a watery bombardment. I roast till my veins drum, then charge out. Thunder cracks, steam erupts from my body, as I dive into 6 °C graphite water. Oh, my Buddha, divine. I laugh so hard I might have swallowed some of the Sami lake spirits whose peace I just disturbed.
Rainwater is blitzing from my forehead. Somehow, lying in the water in the storm, I understand why the Sámi imagine a tripartite cosmos. Heaven above, humans between, the underworld below – and in the middle of it all a sauna, glueing the layers with sweat and steam.
The Finns call that cloud of vapor löyly – a word that once meant spirit. The Sámi would nod – to them every natural element is inhabited. The noaidi – shaman – used a reindeer hide drum (goavddis) to ride trance up the world tree, past the Middle World of people to the Upper realm of Radienáhttje the Father. Offerings of antler or marrow were tucked beneath siedie stones to maintain balance and respect with the natural world and the spiritual beings within it. To keep the cosmic bureaucracy satisfied. Christianity burned the drums, but belief seeped into the seams of life like smoke into pine.
Even modern sauna etiquettes echo old taboos: no cursing, no metal jewellery (the spirits dislike clang), always thank the heat when you leave. Oh, and if you want to make the Sauna Elve really upset? Just try farting, if you dare. You don’t have to believe, but the rituals behave as if you do.
A gravel road curls through spruce until it reaches Elves Village, a cluster of fairy tale-infused log cabins that look storyboarded by Tolkien after a rye vodka binge. In winter, Santa Claus lives here sometimes. One of these log cabins on the riverbank of the Ounasjoki houses a traditional sauna. Here the giant stove eats birch logs, and the room is soot-lacquered like a cast-iron pan. I peel a bundle of young birch branches – soak them, then commence with what could be seen as the ancient art of self-flagellation. But in a nice way. Each gentle slap raises peppery heat across my shoulders, rattles the lymph nodes, and allegedly turbo-charges circulation. Mostly it feels punk-rock: steam, sweat, leaf bits stuck in hair.
Steaming from the core, I sprint with nothing but my birth garment into the Ounasjoki river. The current is pretty fast, 4 °C tops. The river baptises every nerve as I swim back against the current to the little beach I started from. I gulp air so cold it makes my vocal cords squeak. When my feet find the gravel bank again, the world is pixel-sharp: pines gift their delicious smell to the wind, melting together with thick, tarry smoke from the wood sauna of Elves Village.
I take a sip of cloudberry soda from a birch-bark cup. We’d better clean up after us. We do not want to anger Stállu, a huge, hungry, hairy brute in fur pants who eats careless and annoying people. Outside the window, the sky blazes copper and vermilion. Beaivi is doing overtime.
Fifty per cent of this municipality is protected wilderness, besides the ‘ordinary’ wilderness. There are just two people per square kilometre on average. You literary have space to breathe. And the air you breathe is the cleanest, purest air on the planet. No wonder spirits love it here. You feel them when the heater clicks off and wind prowls the roof, when Bieggolmmái fingers the eaves and your heartbeat syncs to the hush.
We are lucky to stay in The Fell, a lovely log cabin looking over untouched nature. It comes with a modern sauna. The stove is electric, the panel glassy as a Tesla dash. Two buttons: unscented water, spruce-scented water. I punch ‘aroma,’ listen to the hiss, and feel the room thicken like broth. A waist-high plunge pool waits on the deck, a steel barrel of close-up winter. As I jump into the one-man ice water holder on the terrace of our log cabin, a fox looks at me, stunned in the infinite twilight. I cannonball, swear in two languages, surface reborn. If these modern saunas are espresso, quick, urban, and efficient, the traditional ones are a slow-roasted myth.
A deep dive into steamy Finnish wellness traditions.
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We know where to go. We know the best places to stay. And we know the local partners who turn a trip into something unforgettable. That’s why when we design your journey, it isn’t just a holiday. It’s a story you’ll carry for life.
Our mission is simple: to inspire you to explore the world with curiosity, optimism, enthusiasm, and respect. To connect with cultures, to marvel at breathtaking landscapes, and to embrace the beauty of untamed nature.
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Finland has three million saunas. A little more than one sauna for every two Finns. They are global winners when it comes to sauna, but the concept is global. Maya sweat houses, Inuit steam igloos, First-Nations lodges. They all share the same thesis: boil impurities, freeze-shock virtue, repeat. In Europe, the tradition almost died when forests thinned in the 1600s, but Finland’s taiga never ran out of kindling, so the stove kept breathing. During wars, soldiers built makeshift saunas at the front, stripping lice and fear before rotating back into hell. Saturday night sauna became sacred hygiene; Friday took over when the five-day workweek arrived. The sauna became the place where babies were born, and the dead were washed.
Literature keeps the flame: Aleksis Kivi burned down Seven Brothers’ cabin on Christmas Eve; Akseli Gallen-Kallela painted rural nudes scrubbing smoke from skin; songwriter Juha Vainio remembered factory men preaching love and dirty jokes through the haze. Politics follows suit: the Finnish Parliament still owns a sauna wing where coalitions thaw as arguments are forbidden; rumour says the stones know more state secrets than the archives of this steam-revering society. As a matter of fact, all government buildings in Finland are required by law to have a sauna on-site.
Inside a sauna, the past lingers like resin: births, farewells, teenage crushes, armistice treaties. Sitting in that wood-walled room, eyes closed, I hear more than sweat drip. I hear Radiengiedde climbing the world tree, feel Saivo ancestors crowd the benches, sense Stállu sulking outside because he’s too stupid to work the latch. The sauna is a damp library of everyone who ever breathed here, human and spirit alike.
Midnight sun peeks through ragged clouds, smearing gold on the lake, and my lungs are buzzing with the purest air. I dive one last time, water knifing skin yet carrying me gently. Floating on my back, one with the chill, I watch Beaivi refuse to set and remember each furnace: digital luxury, soot-lacquered tradition, floating carnival. Three stoves, one country, infinite stories threaded by steam.
Some places you visit, Levi lets you simmer. And when I finally climb the boat, goose-pimpled and grinning, time starts again – but slower, kinder, as if the gods of wind, sun, and silicon buttons agreed to grant you parole until the next löyly calls.
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