Clearly, you cannot eat the view. Twenty years ago, the Countryside Agency in the UK ran a campaign to encourage consumers to purchase fruit, vegetables and meat that would help to enhance and protect the countryside. It was a great idea, but it did not make much difference. Areas with dramatic landscapes are particularly vulnerable to drive-through tourism. People in cars and coaches driving through the countryside to “enjoy the view”. In extreme cases, perhaps stopping twice daily for a cheap lunch and then afternoon tea and to use the toilet. Eswatini, Swaziland as it was known previously, has a particular problem as some coach tours pass through so that passengers can claim another country.
Tourists occasionally pay for the view, where premium prices are charged for rooms with the best view of the sea, mountains, or moors. But the value of the view is captured by the accommodation business, not by those who created and maintain the view. The landscape in the Swale Dale in the North York Moors is particularly important to me, with real emotional resonance. With drystone walls, the remains of lead mines, farm buildings and sheep, the history of the dale can be read in the landscape. For the day visitor, it is for free. The few tourists who stay overnight in the dale may provide an additional income for a farmer or help support the local pub, but holiday homes and rentals increase yearly.
In the middle of Finland, east of Jyväskylä, the Serlachius Museum Gösta has exhibited the Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundations’s collections since 1945, the collection of a wealthy paper mill owner. The art galleries present old masters and artworks reflecting the landscapes it sits in. This art collection adds to and interprets the landscape, the place in which it sits. Visitors can stroll or cycle on the trails through the forest or take a guided tour. The museum’s restaurant offers a Forest on your plate menu: a whitefish appetiser with spruce and juniper flavours, roast deer, chocolate cake accompanied by boletus mushroom ice cream and lingonberries for dessert. Here you can eat the view.
The Behind the Pulp Gate exhibition running until November this year tells about the manufacture of pulp in Mänttä, in Finland’s last sulphite pulp mill. Interviews tell the story from the perspective of everyday life and work, including Black Hand Soap, and providing insights into the cultural environment and environmental impacts of the forest industry on the landscape, ecology and water quality.
Just last year, the Foundation opened an Art Sauna, visitors “ get embraced by a chain of moments in which landscape, art, and architecture blend. It is in that sense that the new sauna space extends that experience into a new more delicate and domestic scale. One of the main strategies is to merge the new art-sauna space with the ground, so it becomes part of the landscape instead of a new building, or a small replica of the well-known museum.”
The “Sauna culture in Finland” has been on the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage since December 2020. “Finnish sauna culture is more than the sauna building or room. It is the heating of the stove; the löyly (the Finnish term for the steam and heat that rise and spread when you pour water onto the hot rocks on top of the stove); the chatter among friends and family; and, for some brave souls, the euphoric feeling that results from plunging into icy water and scampering back into the steamy heat. All of this, and more, forms the intangible heritage of Finnish sauna culture.”
There are 3.3 million saunas in a country of 5.5 million. UNESCO describes it: “ Traditionally, the sauna has been considered as a sacred space – a ‘church of nature’. At the heart of the experience lies löyly, the spirit or steam released by casting water onto a stack of heated stones.”
In the Aalto2 museum in Jyväskylä the Museum of Central Finland traces the history of Central Finland from prehistoric times all the way to the year 2000. “The exhibition ponders and presents the life of the people of the region in the different millennia, centuries, and decades” which provides an understanding of the changing landscape of central Finland and enables visitors to feel the magic of the smoke sauna. The Finnish Sauna Culture exhibition runs to 21 January 2024.
