Alain de Botton once wrote that sunshine “isn’t merely nice”, but “an agent of moral qualities”: generosity, courage, confidence. Perhaps it was once. But today, it seems rather more an agent of chaos and devastation. This summer, wildfires have burned some 200km2 of land, from the New Forest to the Cairngorms, and drought has been declared across half of England. Far from bringing out moral qualities, sunshine has rendered us sleepless, agitated, anxious. Schools close, transport fails, and all the parks are turned to dust. The pleasures of our mild summers are vanishing, and we are driven by walls of heat into air conditioned offices. Only the brave stand outside the pub in the afternoon glare, however cold their pint.
As temperatures continue to rise at home, the Mediterranean destinations – Spain, France, Italy, Portugal and Greece – and city breaks that have dominated Britain’s budget holiday market for decades begin to lose their appeal. The papers reel off statistics from travel agents and hotel chains in evidence of the rise of – their graceless portmanteau – the “coolcation”. According to a Booking.com report, 75 per cent of travellers worldwide now consider the risk of extreme weather when choosing their destination, and a quarter are seeking cooler climes. The online travel agent Trivago finds a more than 50 per cent increase in Brits booking holidays in Sweden and Norway. The car hire company Sixt predicts a 35 per cent increase in travel to Scandinavia this year. The hotel group Hyatt says bookings for summer holidays in Sweden have more than doubled over the past three years. And so on. This can only be a good thing – not least because there is a word in the Nordics, utepils, for the first beer of the season taken outdoors.
I take some petty pleasure in this because it is how I – stubbornly pale, and intolerant of any temperature over 24°C – have long spent my summers. Perhaps my parents sealed my fate with childhood holidays camping in Scotland. Since then, I have driven 1,000km of the ring road that laps Iceland, on which sheep have right of way, leaving behind the tourists at the Blue Lagoon and heading north, in search of humpback whales and bubbling mud. I’ve cycled across an inclement Orkney, soaked through to my knickers, touring Neolithic tombs. I’ve crossed Norway’s Nærøyfjord on my way from Oslo to Bergen, the coastal city ringed by seven mountains, and kayaked around the Gothenburg archipelago.
There is something special about a Scandinavian summer, and a Swedish summer in particular. Fly into Malmö (or, better yet, Copenhagen), pick up a car and drive to Österlen, on Sweden’s south-eastern tip. In Götaland, the craggy archipelagos and boreal forests of the north give way to the gently undulating, pastoral landscapes for which Österlen is often compared to Provence. By June, the bright yellow of the rapeseed turns a glowing gold, the lavender fields are fragrant and bright, and the beaches – long, pristine – recall those of Northumberland, or perhaps, on especially sunny days, the Caribbean.
Even in the southerly regions of Sweden that the midnight sun does not quite reach, there is a white, luminous quality to the light in summer. Dusk stretches into dawn without the sky having ever truly become dark; it is quite possible to walk without streetlights, even (if your eyes are good) to read a book, by the light of the night sky. The long dark nights and grey frosty seas of the region’s best-known export, noir, are all but forgotten.
This light makes Österlen a favourite of artists, and you’ll not drive long along its wide, quiet roads without coming across a ceramicist’s studio or an independent art gallery. In-between, you’ll find farmshops, orchards, stone circles and megalithic tombs, micro-bakeries for kardemummabullar or a prinsesstårta, and some of Sweden’s finest dining. Best of all, the temperature rarely surpasses 22°C.
Why do we travel? Perhaps our restlessness is an evolutionary remnant of the hundreds of thousands of years we spent as a nomadic species – hunting and foraging, seeking trade, waging war – before, 10,000 or so years ago, we began to understand “home” as a particular and enduring place. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Grand Tour exposed high-born men to the art, antiquities, customs and soirées of the Continent – a more cultured precursor to the modern gap year in Asia.
As the steam railway expanded in the 19th century, travel became something else – something closer to the modern summer holiday: a means of escape. To think, to read, to sleep, to leave behind work; to, in the ease and simplicity of warmth, become more embodied, present people; to see more clearly from a distance what we have left behind. Or, as De Botton puts it, so that the misery of life’s “actual conditions” do not drive us to “fall into fury, despair and unshakeable depression”. And we travel to escape Britain’s unpredictable weather, which we have long considered a kind of national defect. But as England becomes more Mediterranean in climate, the Mediterranean no longer seems like such a relief. We want, always, what we don’t have.
In the 19th century, too, we travelled in search of a different sort of air, believing that a change in atmosphere could heal everything from tuberculosis to overwork. The practice became known as “the climate cure”. But if extreme heat is our malady, the cure calls us north.
[Further reading: The battle for Mallorca]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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