Sommarøy, a small island off the coast of northern Norway, has become known as a place where visitors can lose all track of time, according to a video report from TF1info. The island lies at 69 degrees north latitude, roughly 3,500 kilometres from Paris, and is close enough to the Arctic that the sun barely sets during the summer months.
The report showed a beach described as immaculate and a sea so turquoise that the scene could pass for the Bahamas or the heart of the Pacific. The water, however, is far from tropical: it sits at around 10 degrees Celsius.
The island lies well inside the Arctic Circle, the line of latitude at just under 66.5 degrees north beyond which the sun can stay visible around the clock at the height of summer. That midnight sun is part of what gives Sommarøy its unusual look, with turquoise water and pale sand sitting under a sky that never fully darkens.
The island that declared itself free of time
Sommarøy is known for once declaring itself "liberated from time," a symbolic gesture that drew international attention. The declaration grew out of the island's extreme relationship with daylight: for weeks each summer, the sun does not dip below the horizon, leaving days and nights to blur into one another.
The 2019 campaign, which received wide media coverage at the time, argued that clock time made little sense on an island where the sun does not go down for weeks on end, and where everyday activities could just as easily happen at midnight as at noon.
According to the report, the North Pole lies just 2,000 kilometres from Sommarøy, a measure of how far north the island sits.
A remote corner of Arctic Norway
Sommarøy sits near Tromsø, one of the largest cities above the Arctic Circle, in a region where small island and fishing communities are linked to the mainland by bridges. Places this far north experience the midnight sun through summer and near-permanent darkness in winter, a contrast that has long drawn travellers curious about life at the edge of the map.
The report aired as part of "Découverte et évasion," a recurring travel segment on TF1info's lunchtime news programme, "Le 13H." It ran two minutes and twelve seconds and was produced by the channel's video news team, which regularly profiles unusual destinations for its travel coverage.
