To be in the mood quickly in Tampere, Finland, you have to start by taking line 2. It leads to the Käpylä district, located in the northeast of this little-known city of 250,000 inhabitants, just an hour and a half from Helsinki. The terminus is a cul-de-sac in the middle of the forest, in a setting worthy of a Scandinavian series. There is a leaden silence.
You can easily “make a movie”, especially in the middle of December, when it snows heavily, everything is white and night falls at 3 p.m. After some hesitation, finally a path and people that we guess in the distance, under the steam of the oldest public sauna in the city, the Rauhaniemi, named after the first inhabitant of Käpylä.
On the shore of Lake Näsijärvi, the spa dating from the 1920s boasts a diving board and a pontoon fitted out as an extension of the building, for easier access to the lake in winter. Many residents of Tampere learned to swim at this beach. Built in the 1960s, the Rauhaniemi sauna is an institution.
A place of conviviality
Open every day, it is part of the Finnish way of life. It is even a necessity, we wash there, we chat there, relax and sometimes meditate there. A place of sociability and rituals. In the past, women gave birth in saunas, and the sick were cared for there. In Finland, they can be found in most homes, but also in restaurants, cafes, museums and public places.
At the very beginning of December, the lake is not yet frozen. “In the middle of winter, trails for walking and skiing are laid out there, people go to the lighthouse to grill their sausages and spend the day there with their families. It’s a new public square.” says architecture teacher Rosana Rubio-Hernandez.
A veil of steam emerges from the icy water where one bathes when leaving the sauna. The atmosphere here is not quiet, everyone is talking, and many wear a traditional wool felt bathing hat to protect against heatstroke as the temperature hovers around 90 degrees. These regulars stay ten to fifteen minutes, go out in the cold, drink a little water, dive into the lake, stay in small groups outside, shower and repeat this same ritual several times.
Tampere lends itself perfectly to this game of hot and cold. Stuck in the middle of two lakes, the Pyhäjärvi to the south and the Näsijärvi to the north, the city is surrounded by water. Its two lakes are connected by the Tammerkoski River, a source of energy which was not lost on the Scottish engineer James Finlayson (1771-1852). In the middle of the 19the century, he channeled the river and set up the first textile factory there.
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