Finse Fjellstue Badstuene

Finse Fjellstue Badstuene is a mountain sauna at Finse station on the Bergen Railway at 1,222 metres altitude in the Hardangervidda plateau, the largest mountain plateau in Europe at 8,000 square kilometres, where the treeless arctic-alpine landscape of snow, boulder fields, and reindeer herds stretching to every horizon creates one of the most extreme and elemental settings for sauna bathing available anywhere in Norway. The Hardangervidda's combination of austere beauty and brutal winter conditions made it the location chosen by Ridley Scott for the Hoth ice planet scenes in The Empire Strikes Back, and the plateau's winter landscape of deep snow, frozen lakes, and howling wind carries a visual authority that Hollywood's special effects technicians could not improve upon. The siliceous spring water of the Finse area feeds the sauna facility at a railway halt that in winter is accessible only by train, its snowbound isolation making the act of bathing here an experience of Nordic thermal culture in its most uncompromised and meteorologically serious form.