Luleå, the Swedish city that combats winter loneliness by encouraging strangers to greet each other

2023-12-23 23:23:33

On the snowy coast of Luleå, a city in northern Sweden, bathers immerse themselves in the icy water through a rectangular hole in the ice sheet that covers the sea. It’s barely two in the afternoon and the sun is already disappearing. In the middle of winter, there will only be three hours of light a day.

“Afterwards you feel like a rush of happiness,” says Katariina Yliperttula, 44, who takes a dip before going to work. She almost never swims in the summer, but a couple of years ago she started doing it often during the winter.