New Delhi: Imagine having a whole island to yourself—no other human in sight. Sweden has just made the dream come true with its new tourism campaign. The country’s tourist board, Visit Sweden, has awarded five of its islands to foreigners in a competition—no billionaire was allowed to apply.
The motive behind the initiative, according to Visit Sweden’s website, was to show that “true luxury isn’t about excess, but rather about time, space and balance”.
As part of the prize, the Swedish government will give one-year-long access to the winners, along with a travel voucher worth £1,590. The islands won’t have accommodations.
Miriam Wiskemann, a 27-year-old German student, is one of the winners. She now gets to be the “custodian” (not owner) of the 180-metre by 50-metre island named Marsten, according to The Times. She is one of the 2,200 applicants from 100 countries who applied for the competition. And she is one of the many Germans who grow up dreaming about Swedish islands.
Marsten, the island she is a custodian of for one whole year, does not have a single human living there. The island used to be a picnic site, but then cormorants came to occupy it in the 1990s, so the humans stepped back, respecting the water birds. Reportedly, the Swedish visit the island on kayaking trips. Sweden is richer for archipelagos—it has more than 2,67,000 islands. No other country in the world has that.
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An artist’s dream
Wiskemann started learning Swedish after finishing school in Berlin. She even lived in Stockholm between 2020 and 2021. “The Swedish nature and the stark differences of the seasons have always really inspired me and my art,” she quoted by The Times.
As her entry for the Visit Sweden competition, she submitted a video—it has clips of Wiskemann’s travel through Sweden when she was living there and the illustrations she made inspired by the journey.
Kicker: Wiskemann will start her trip to the island in September, before she starts the final project of her degree in illustration.
“I’ll take time to cycle around the island and draw a lot of inspiration from my surroundings,” Wiskemann said. “Having this luxury of being able to travel there will definitely have a big influence on me.”