Sauna Culture Around the World: One Country Made It Heritage, Two Are Losing It

Finnish sauna culture entered the UNESCO representative list on 17 December 2020. It was Finland's first inscription.

The scale is the striking part. Roughly 3.2 million saunas for about 5.5 million people, according to Finnish government and heritage agency figures. The UNESCO entry gives 3.3 million for 5.5 million, so the two sources differ slightly. Around 90 percent of Finns use one at least once a week.

The core of the experience is löyly, the steam that rises when water is thrown onto heated stones. Historically the sauna was treated as a sacred space, described as a church of nature. Electric, wood-heated, smoke and infrared forms all count, and the listing explicitly places no hierarchy among them. Transmission happens mostly at home.

Intangible heritage listing usually protects something that is fading. Finnish sauna is a thing nine in ten people do every week. What went on the list was not a building or an institution. It was a habit.

Most German saunas are textilfrei, meaning nudity is the norm, and mixed-gender use is standard. Many venues run women-only sessions or days alongside. The background usually cited is the country's Freikörperkultur tradition, and the ban on swimwear gets explained on both hygiene and tradition grounds.

Then there is Aufguss. A sauna master pours infused water or ice onto the stones and works a large towel to drive the heat through the room. You do not enter or leave once it has started, and applause at the end is normal.

Hold this next to Korea. Korean bathhouses are also nude, and rigidly separated by sex. Germany shares nudity across genders instead. The same practice of undressing rests on opposite norms.

One note on sourcing. This section draws on guidance and explainer material rather than primary records, so it describes norms without offering figures.

The hammam grew out of Roman and Byzantine bathing and took its own form under the Ottomans, combining the Roman public bath system with an Islamic emphasis on running water. Istanbul still has hammams dating from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.

Three rooms. A cool room for undressing and resting, a warm room to acclimatise, and a hot room with steam and hot water. In the centre of the hot room sits the göbek taşı, a heated marble platform.

The sequence runs like this. You wrap in a peştemal, a rough kese mitt takes off the dead skin, olive oil soap becomes a foam massage, you rinse, and you drink tea in the resting room. The person doing the scrubbing has a title: tellak for men, natır for women.

That last detail is the one worth carrying to the Korean section. Body scrubbing is not a Korean invention, and Türkiye kept an occupational name for it.

Public bathhouses, the sento, numbered 1,562 in 2025. From a 1968 peak of 17,999, that is a ninety percent decline, and the count is falling by about five percent a year. On that trend the figure drops below 1,000 within a decade.

Sento are governed under the public bathhouse law, and each prefecture caps the price. Water bill reductions and similar support keep them cheap. The reasons given for closures are familiar: bathrooms in every home, no successors, ageing buildings, and competition from large super-sento.

Revenue moved the other way. Market sales for fiscal 2025 are projected around 120 billion yen, more than thirty percent above the 88.3 billion of fiscal 2020 and the highest since the pandemic. An ageing regular clientele widened to younger people and families, and venues that invested in features like automatic steam bursts and barrel saunas pulled in visitors from further away.

Profitability got worse anyway. With fuel and labour costs rising, one in four operators ran a loss in fiscal 2024 and projected fiscal 2025 profit fell to half the previous year.

User numbers went in a third direction. A 2024 survey counted 16.48 million sauna users, down about 1.31 million from 17.79 million, with most of the drop among the lightest users.

Venues down, revenue up, users down. All three are true, which is why calling the sauna boom a revival of bathing culture does not quite hold.

The peak was 2003, with 9,919 licensed bathhouses. On a population of 48 million that was roughly one per 4,800 people. In 2004 openings fell below closures for the first time, 639 against 725, and the count has shrunk every year since. The 9,000 line broke in 2008, the 8,000 line in 2013 and the 7,000 line in 2018. As of 2022 there were 6,012.

Seoul shows it faster. Some 510 remain in 2025, a 71 percent fall from the 1995 peak. The declines clustered in three periods: the late-1990s financial crisis, the mid-2000s shakeout after the jjimjilbang boom, and the pandemic. In 2006 alone 118 closed in Seoul, and 242 closed there across the three pandemic years, including several of the city's best-known large jjimjilbang.

By district, Seongbuk-gu fell hardest, from 117 in 1995 to 23. What fills the gap is a different kind of business, small scrub and skin-care shops registered under a separate bathhouse subcategory.

Operators point to boiler fuel and utility costs. One sauna in central Seoul that had run for 28 years closed with accumulated losses of 400 million won. The longer background is that bathing itself shifted from the tub to the shower.

Reading this as a story about facilities misses half of it. A neighbourhood bathhouse was also a place where the same residents met at the same hour. The clearest sign of what is changing is that sesin is migrating from the bathhouse to the one-person scrub shop. The practice survives. The room full of people does not.