Thermes Tampere — Rajaportin Sauna

Rajaportin Sauna in Tampere is the oldest public sauna still in operation in Finland, opened in 1906 for the workers of the cotton and textile mills that made Tampere the Manchester of the north, a city whose red-brick factory chimneys and radical labour politics earned it a reputation as the most class-conscious and intellectually febrile city in the Nordic world. The sauna served the Pispala neighbourhood, a hillside community of wooden workers' houses above the Pyhajarvei lake, whose combination of proletarian heritage, bohemian arts scene, and extraordinary lakescape makes Pispala one of the most distinctive urban neighbourhoods in Scandinavia. To bathe at Rajaportin is to participate in a century-long working-class tradition in a city that hosted the extraordinary coincidence of Lenin and a young Hitler at the same socialist congress in 1905, making Tampere a small footnote in the history of the twentieth century's most catastrophic political movements.