The Finnish Sauna Ritual and a Baltic Plunge

Finland has three million saunas for a population of 5.5 million people. The sauna (the only Finnish word to have entered the English language unchanged) is not a luxury here — it is a necessity, a social institution, a spiritual practice, and a public health facility all at once. The Finnish sauna tradition differs from the steam rooms of most European spas in one essential way: it uses dry heat (typically 70-100 degrees Celsius) with occasional small amounts of water thrown on the kiuas (heated stones) to produce löyly (steam). You sweat intensely, the birch vihta (bundle of birch branches soaked in water) is used to gently beat the skin and release its aromatic oils, and then you cool down.

In Helsinki, the Löyly sauna and restaurant on the Hernesaari waterfront is the city's finest modern public sauna: three sauna rooms opening directly onto a wooden terrace and the sea. The Allas Sea Pool near the Market Square has indoor and outdoor pools alongside sauna facilities. The Kotiharjun Sauna in Kallio is the oldest public wood-fired sauna in Helsinki, opened 1928, and the real thing: tiles, wooden benches, no frills, extraordinary.

The plunge is mandatory and the first time you do it — stepping from 80-degree heat directly into a sea that is approximately 8 degrees Celsius — the shock is considerable. Ten seconds in the water and you emerge with your skin burning, your heart thumping, and a sensation of total aliveness that is genuinely difficult to describe. Repeat three or four times over an hour. The beer afterward (in Finland, taken between or after sauna rounds, never before) is the greatest beer of your life, every time.