The 10 best saunas in the world

The oldest one still going · Tampere

Everything else on this list is younger than this room. Tampere has run it since 1906 — wood-heated, low-ceilinged, dark — and a century has not required it to become anything else. No architect, no programme, no concept. It is the benchmark the rest are measured against.

Smoke · € · Drop-in

A ceremony, not a session · Haanja

UNESCO lists the Estonian smoke-sauna tradition, and Eda Veeroja's farm in the Haanja hills is where it is practised rather than described. A day to heat the chimneyless room, three hours minimum inside it, birch whisking and the pond in between. You book by arrangement, and you give it the evening.

Smoke · €€€ · Cold plunge · Session-booked

Timber lattice, smoke room, Baltic · Helsinki

Proof that a new building can earn a place beside a hundred-year-old one. A timber lattice on the Hernesaari shore holding a smoke sauna and a wood-heated room, both with the Baltic a few steps away, and a restaurant for afterwards. Helsinki's most photographed sauna is also one of its best.

Finnish · Smoke · €€ · Session-booked

1892, and two owners since · New York

Russian parilka, Turkish steam, redwood Finnish room, ice plunge, roof deck — a whole survey of traditions in one East Village basement, running since 1892. Two owners still alternate weeks, so the place you get depends on the week you pick. Walk-in, communal, and completely uninterested in being comfortable.

Banya · Finnish · Steam · Ice · $$ · Cold plunge · Drop-in

Glass pirts in a Latvian forest · Sigulda

Three architecturally distinct bathhouses in the forests near Sigulda: a glass pirts framing the woods, a blackened smoke pirts, and a wool-lined sauna that has won awards. Pirts masters guide the sessions in the Latvian ritual tradition, with cold plunges and a swimming pond between rounds. Nowhere else looks like this.

Finnish · Smoke · €€€ · Cold plunge · Session-booked

Twelve saunas, one Árdna · Oslo

Twelve saunas is not a facility, it is a settlement. Árdna is the one that matters — a vast room built on Sámi lines, given over to ritual or to DJ sets depending on the night — and the others surround it on the Oslo waterfront beside the Opera House. Few places anywhere offer this much choice in a single visit.

Finnish · under kr25 · Cold plunge · Drop-in

1898, at the end of a pier · Malmö

Open-air bathing at the end of a pier in the Öresund, unchanged in its essentials since 1898. Several saunas, one wood-fired, and the cooling is a ladder into the sea rather than a tub of any kind. The sexes bathe separately, the aufguss tradition is old here, and the light over the strait at sunset is half the reason to go.

Finnish · Steam · under kr25 · Cold plunge · Drop-in

Hosts the Aufguss world championships · Wendisch Rietz

Nine saunas on the Scharmützelsee in Brandenburg, one of them a theatre sauna staged for show-Aufguss, and the resort has hosted the Aufguss World Championships more than once. It is built around the sauna rather than the pool, which is rarer in the genre than it ought to be. The lake does the cooling.

Finnish · €€ · Drop-in

A ninety-person performance sauna · Toronto

Ninety people in a Western Red Cedar room, eight individual ice baths, and an amphitheatre-style tea lounge built around a fireplace. Sessions run as guided classes or free-flow, from loud and social through to quiet and meditative. Whatever you make of sauna as performance, nobody else is doing it at this scale.

Finnish · Ice · $$ · Cold plunge · Session-booked

Where the water arrives hot · Hot Springs

The only entry here where the water comes out of the ground already hot. Bathhouse Row has run since 1912 and the Buckstaff never converted itself into a spa: a private whirlpool of thermal spring water, a sitz bath, a steam cabinet, hot towel packs, a short massage if you pay for it. No booking, and the sexes are on separate floors.

Steam · $$ · Drop-in