A Whole Coastline with Its Lights On

Imagine paddling through the Stockholm archipelago after dark. No engines, no crowds, only water, silence and a sky that slowly empties of light.

This is Moonlight Safari Paddling, one of 15 off-season experiences piloted in the Light in the Dark project. Astrid Landgren Patterson, the entrepreneur behind Kajak & Uteliv, turned the dark into the product.

Every autumn along the northern Baltic Sea, the same thing happens. The summer guests leave, the shutters go down, and many tourism businesses stay closed for seven to nine months. The heating bill and the insurance do not close with them. Most simply wait for the summer to return.

Light in the Dark started with a different question: what if the dark months were something to embrace, not something to wait out?

Before offering any answers, the project listened. It asked more than 200 entrepreneurs why they close, and almost 5,000 travellers across Europe what would bring them north in the off-season. The travellers wanted nature, adventure, wellbeing and a taste of local culture.

Then the entrepreneurs got their turn. Astrid joined online workshops with other small tourism businesses, where the questions were simple and hard. Who is your guest? What can you offer when the days are short? And what is your story? Her own reason for joining was practical. “I wanted to develop my business, especially the shoulder seasons. The best time for kayaking is September, after all.”

Then came the real test. Guests joined the pilot and gave their verdict. One called it “a magical and safe way to experience nature at night.” Astrid remembers the sounds of wonder, and the quiet. “Almost reverent silence. The silence is more noticeable when it’s dark.”

The pilot changed how she sees the quiet months. “There is definitely potential outside the summer,” Astrid says. Paddling itself works best in the shoulder seasons, because of the cold water, but developing other products that don’t involve paddling now feels closer than before the project.

Astrid was not alone. Fourteen other entrepreneurs in Finland, Åland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden tested their own ideas in the same quiet months: a seaside sauna, a taste of a coastal fisherman’s life, forest bathing, a boat trip to see eider ducks, a quiet walk by the water, and an apple farm where a guest said it felt “like visiting someone’s home, not a tourist site.”

One business is a small voice on a big map. Fifteen, across five countries, are a region worth travelling to in the dark months. The network behind the project had seen this from the start: the northern Baltic Sea is too small to be noticed one company at a time. A single lit window is easy to miss. A whole coastline with its lights on is not.

Light in the Dark brought these businesses together across borders, so that a traveller who finds one of them can discover the rest. For Astrid, the value was closer to home. “It has been fun to see that others have similar problems, and to see their solutions. My network has grown, especially among the companies that took part throughout the whole project.”

Asked what travellers should find along the coast in the dark months, Astrid’s answer is about the coast as a whole: “Open communities, and the chance to explore nature and feel its forces, which are more tangible in autumn, winter and spring than in summer.”

The dark season does not have to be an empty one. It can be the reason to come.

Programme Manual Online

Choose