Anyone travelling into northern Europe from the south begins to notice around the Danish town of Århus, or Sweden’s Falkenberg, that the fields and woods of the countryside open out and that the distance between towns starts to widen.

The skies become more expansive – seemingly endlessly so – and are so near that you could almost touch them, with the odd wisp of thick, fluffy or candy-floss cloud drifting across their shades of perfectly clear blue.

The seas, fjords and countless lakes act as a mirror to what is above, while the shimmering light of the sun warms the skin and reaches through the whole body into the soul, where it must stay locked away for almost a year.

Compared to the long winters, Scandinavian summers are exceptionally short, though very spectacular. Nightfall is postponed until midnight, and the sun begins to produce bright stripes in the sky as early as 2 am. All Nordic people, be they Danes or Swedes, Norwegians or Finns, enjoy getting outside and into nature during the summer months, and spend time at summer houses and parties, at open-air concerts and festivals, and fishing, barbecuing and gathering berries.

During the summer months, a sense of (quite un-Protestant) joviality even descends on the churches, and the sun and light brings a brightness to people’s hearts – all the more so as they know the long days will soon start to draw in again. Indeed, if it rains for two days in July, locals will start to say the summer is over, though only three days later will happily comment: “What a marvellous summer we’re having again!”

In no other region of the world do people live as closely to the North Pole as in Scandinavia, and nowhere else is the polar landscape quite as accessible. The four Scandinavian countries stretch across 6,000 kilometres, from the Danish town of Rödby, to Norway’s Nordkapp, with a third of that distance lying north of the Arctic Circle. In this region, the nights never get dark from 20 May until 25 July, with the transformation from evening dusk to morning light barely noticeable.

Indeed, in the north Swedish town of Kiruna, the sun shines continuously for 45 days, while that figure stands at 127 days in Norway’s Spitzbergen.

For the rest of the year though, either total darkness or a dusk-like light reign, so it’s no wonder that people make sure they get the very most out of summer.