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Stockholm’s hobbit village to be eco-friendly

A real-life hobbit village will soon be nestled in the lush forests of a Swedish island, a whimsical housing scheme billed as the first of its kind - but behind the fantasy gimmick lies a genuine interest for sustainable development.

Published: 7 October 2013 07:20 CEST
Stockholm's hobbit village to be eco-friendly

The hobbits, small characters with hairy feet in novelist J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy classics, are a model of environmentally friendly living, said British hobbit-house architect Simon Dale.

“Hobbits portray people living a peaceful life in harmony with nature,” Dale, 35, told AFP on a recent visit to Stockholm.

He was in town to plan for the cluster of 30 houses on Muskö, an island located some 40 kilometres from the city centre as the crow flies amid Stockholm’s picturesque archipelago. The island’s first hobbit house is scheduled to be ready in mid-2014, with the village completed within a few years.

At first sight, the huts resemble Bilbo Baggins’s dwellings in the Shire in Tolkien’s 1937 novel The Hobbit.

Click here for a gallery of Simon Dale’s hobbit house in Wales

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” begins Tolkien’s tale. “It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle.”

In Tolkien’s idyllic agrarian setting, the hobbits live in tune with nature – in stark contrast to the author’s era of mature industrialization. The Swedish hobbit village will keep the notion of natural materials and soft, round shapes: the windows, doors and walls will all be curved.

Yet the houses will be slightly more up-to-date, built for modern city-dwellers longing to retreat to nature on weekends and holidays. An induction hob, beside a wood-burning range, will be the “most high-tech thing integrated,” said Dale, whose design promises airy ceilings up to 3.5 metres high.

Energy efficiency will be a primary goal, so heating will come from solar power and wood-burning. Natural building materials from the area will also be used, such as timber, stone, sand, clay and grass.

Dale himself has lived in a hobbit house for the past decade with his wife and two kids. The family now resides in the West Wales community of Lammas, the first British low-impact eco-village of its kind. Building the earth houses has become a passion, said Dale, originally a photographer.

The village isn’t targeted at fans of Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” – rather, it’s intended to appeal to those who care about the environment and want to live close to nature.

“It’s a transition in lifestyle and values,” said Dale, who bears a faint resemblance to Bilbo as played by Martin Freeman in the new “Hobbit” blockbuster film trilogy.

‘Hobbit-holes’ and a Dream Farm

Sweden, like other countries taking the lead in sustainable development, has in recent years seen a boom in eco-friendly urban renewal projects. But Dale noted a key difference between those projects and his.

They “aim to maximize the efficiency of resource consumption, while we aim to minimize resource consumption,” he said, adding that sustainability doesn’t require fancy new gadgets but can instead be attained by living more simply.

He said Muskö was the perfect location for his project. Home to a naval base decommissioned nine years ago, the island has a natural forest and farming landscape, yet is conveniently equipped with well-developed infrastructure, including a grocery store, restaurant, pharmacy, public transport and a three-kilometre tunnel connecting it to the mainland.

The island is also home to an eco-project called Drömgården, or The Dream Farm, which is building an environmentally sustainable community and which invited Dale to collaborate. Apart from his “hobbit-holes”, the village will feature 350 eco-friendly homes.

Local farmers and residents are intrigued to see the old agricultural estate being brought back to life, providing jobs and atmosphere, said Dale. Yet for the moment the entire project remains in the realm of Tolkien’s fantasy, pending real-world bureaucratic clearance.

“It’s up to the municipality to give us the green light, but we’re optimistic,” said project organizer Marie Eriksson.

TT/The Local/og

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TRAVEL NEWS

Why are fewer British tourists visiting Spain this year?

Almost 800,000 fewer UK holidaymakers have visited Spain in 2023 when compared to 2019. What’s behind this big drop?

Published: 23 August 2023 11:36 CEST
Updated: 26 August 2023 18:32 CEST
Why are fewer British tourists visiting Spain this year?

Spain welcomed 12.2 million UK tourists between January and July 2023, 6 percent less when compared to the same period in 2019, according to data released on Monday by Spanish tourism association Turespaña.

This represents a decrease of 793,260 British holidaymakers for Spain so far this year.

Conversely, the number of Italian (+8 percent), Irish (+15.3 percent), Portuguese (+24.8 percent), Dutch (+4 percent) and French tourists (+5 percent) visiting España in 2023 are all above the rates in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year. 

German holidaymakers are together with their British counterparts the two main nationalities showing less interest in coming to Spanish shores.

Britons still represent the biggest tourist group that comes to Spain, but it’s undergoing a slump, with another recent study by Caixabank Research suggesting numbers fell particularly in June 2023 (-12.5 percent of the usual rate). 

READ ALSO: Spain fully booked for summer despite most expensive holiday prices ever

So are some Britons falling out of love with Spain? Are there clear reasons why a holiday on the Spanish coast is on fewer British holiday itineraries?

According to Caixabank Research’s report, the main reasons are “the poor macroeconomic performance of the United Kingdom, the sharp rise in rates and the weakness of the pound”.

This is evidenced in the results of a survey by British market research company Savanta, which found that one in six Britons are not going on a summer holiday this year due to the UK’s cost-of-living crisis.

Practically everything, everywhere has become more expensive, and that includes holidays in Spain: hotel stays are up 44 percent, eating out is 13 percent pricier, and flights are 40 percent more on average. 

READ ALSO: How much more expensive is it to holiday in Spain this summer?

Caixabank stressed that another reason for the drop in British holidaymakers heading to Spain is that those who can afford a holiday abroad are choosing “more competitive markets” such as Turkey, Greece and Portugal. 

And there’s no doubt that the insufferably hot summer that Spain is having, with four heatwaves so far, has also dissuaded many holidaymakers from Blighty from overcooking in the Spanish sun. 

With headlines such as “This area of Spain could become too hot for tourists” or “tourists say it’s too hot to see any sights” featuring in the UK press, budding British holidaymakers are all too aware of the suffocating weather conditions Spain and other Mediterranean countries are enduring. 

Other UK outlets have urged travellers to try out the cooler Spanish north rather than the usual piping hot Costa Blanca and Costa del Sol destinations.

Another UK poll by InsureandGo found that 71 percent of the 2,000+ British respondents thought that parts of Europe such as Spain, Greece and Turkey will be too hot to visit over summer by 2027.

There’s further concern that the introduction in 2024 of the new (and delayed) ETIAS visa for non-EU visitors, which of course now also applies to UK nationals, could further compel British tourists to choose countries to holiday in rather than Spain.

READ MORE: Will British tourists need to pay for a visa waiver to enter Spain?

However, a drop in the number of British holidaymakers may not be all that bad for Spain, even though they did spend over €17 billion on their Spanish vacations in 2022. 

Towns, cities and islands across the country have been grappling with the problem of overtourism and the consequences it has on everything from quality of life for locals to rent prices. 

READ ALSO: ‘Beach closed’ – Fake signs put up in Spain’s Mallorca to dissuade tourists

The overcrowded nature of Spain’s beaches and most beautiful holiday hotspots appears to be one of the reasons why Germans are visiting Spain in far fewer numbers. A recent report in the country’s most read magazine Stern asked “if the dream is over” in their beloved Mallorca.

Spanish authorities are also seeking to overhaul the cheaper holiday package-driven model that dominates many resorts, which includes moving away from the boozy antics of young British and other European revellers.

Fewer tourists who spend more are what Spain is theoretically now looking for, and the rise in American, Japanese and European tourists other than Brits signify less of a dependence on the British market, one which tends to maintain the country’s tourism status quo for better or for worse.

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