Before Finns had saunas at home, they had them at the edge of the lake, in a shed behind the village, somewhere everyone could get to. That’s the version of sauna culture that’s quietly shaping the current boom, and it has very little to do with the private, spa style saunas most people picture when sauna comes up in conversation now. Public saunas are returning across Europe and North America too, a natural extension of Finnish sauna culture rather than an import that lost its roots along the way.
Sauna from Finland, the network behind much of the push to keep that growth authentic, has also been part of the wider conversation that gave rise to a different kind of project this year: Sauna for All. It started the way a lot of industry projects start, with people talking shop at a conference. At the World Sauna Forum, public sauna operators from a few different countries compared notes and found they were all wrestling with the same problems. That conversation turned into the Public Sauna Bathing Charter.
Kotisauna and Kamu Sauna in Canada signed on. So did Humans Who Bathe out of Mexico/Canada and Fad Saoil in Ireland, plus a handful of community sauna groups in the UK. All four of the Canadian, Mexico-based and Irish founders are Sauna from Finland members, and Carita Harju, who founded Sauna from Finland, worked with the group as the Charter came together, helping figure out how it could plug into the wider network rather than compete with it.
Ten principles, none of them radical
The Charter runs to ten principles, grouped under four headings. Practice covers the basics you’d expect, things like open access, shared heat and shared space, and respect for tradition. Keeping is really about priorities. It means putting public good ahead of private profit, caring about a sauna’s sense of place, and making sure community needs come first when decisions get made. Tending feels more like a mindset than a rule.
A sauna gets treated with real care instead of just being maintained, and it stays in some kind of reciprocity with the natural world around it rather than just sitting on top of it. Stewardship closes the loop. The wellbeing a sauna produces is meant to circulate through a whole community, not stop with whoever happened to book that particular slot, and public sauna deserves support as exactly that. Public. None of it is radical. Most of it is just what Finnish public saunas have been doing for a long time, finally written down so other countries can leverage the parts that work.
Why this sounds familiar to pool operators
Pool operators will recognise a lot of this without needing it explained. A pool and a public sauna solve the same basic problem for a town, giving people somewhere to go that isn’t a café or a mall. Put a sauna on an existing waterfront or next to a pool that otherwise dies off in October, and suddenly there’s a reason to show up in January too.
The harder part is running the thing. High foot traffic, people who’ve never sat in a sauna and don’t know the etiquette, hygiene that has to hold up under constant use, this is the daily reality, not a footnote. The equipment side is unforgiving in its own way. A heater built for a family cabin will not hold up to forty bathers a day, and neither will materials or ventilation that weren’t built with that kind of load in mind. Löyly has to stay good at 4pm on a Saturday, not just for the first group in the door at nine. This is roughly where Sauna from Finland’s member companies earn their keep, supplying the heaters, timber and ventilation systems meant for exactly that kind of punishment.
The question private saunas never have to answer
There’s a phrase Sauna from Finland uses for its own quality standard, the Authentic Finnish Sauna Experience, and it treats a sauna visit as something that starts before you walk in and doesn’t end when you leave. Apply that to a public sauna and a new question shows up that private saunas never have to answer, which is who actually feels comfortable walking through that door, and who doesn’t.
Whether the current sauna boom outlasts the moment probably depends more on answers to that question than on how good any single heater is. Municipal pools, resorts and leisure centres are already circling public sauna as the next obvious addition, and the appeal is real. A facility that pulls people in across all twelve months is not something operators get offered very often. But the thing that made Finnish sauna worth exporting in the first place wasn’t the heat. It was who got to sit in it.
Learn more about Sauna from Finland at saunafromfinland.com and about the Charter at saunaforall.org.
Media contact, Becky Pelkonen, Sauna from Finland, becky@saunafromfinland.com
