The Sommarøy Time-Free Zone: What Actually Happened

In June 2019, a small fishing island in Arctic Norway made headlines around the world: Sommarøy, population roughly 300, was reportedly petitioning to become “the world’s first time-free zone.” Islanders were said to have signed a petition to abolish clock time, and photos circulated of wristwatches tied to the railing of the Sommarøy bridge — surrendered, the story went, by people who no longer needed them. BBC, CNN, The Guardian and Time all ran it.

Here’s the part most articles never got around to correcting: it was a paid marketing campaign.

The campaign behind the headlines

Within weeks, Norwegian media revealed that the “time-free island” story had been engineered as a tourism PR stunt. The idea did start locally — islander Kjell Ove Hveding acted as its public face — but Innovation Norway, the state tourism-promotion agency, worked with the islanders to turn it into a global campaign. Visit Norway emailed a press release to international media, complete with staged photos of a supposed petition “handover” in front of Norway’s Parliament in Oslo. Reported cost: around €50,000 in fees to PR agencies in Oslo and London. Reported reach: more than 1.2 billion people across 1,600+ articles. The head of Innovation Norway publicly apologized for it.

So no — you cannot visit a legally time-free zone on Sommarøy. Nobody abolished anything. The watches on the bridge were props. What you can visit is the place that made the story believable in the first place, because the underlying phenomenon is completely real.

The real thing: two months without a sunset

Sommarøy sits at roughly 69°N, well above the Arctic Circle. In the Tromsø region the midnight sun period runs from about May 18 to July 25 — for over two months the sun never drops below the horizon. Locals genuinely do repaint houses at midnight, fish at 2 a.m., and let kids play outside at hours that would look absurd further south. That lived reality — daylight decoupled from the clock — is what gave the campaign its hook. Our midnight sun page covers when to come and what it actually looks like at 1 a.m. on a white-sand beach.

The mirror image arrives in winter: the polar night, roughly November 27 to January 15 in this region, when the sun never rises at all. It isn’t pitch black — there’s a long blue twilight in the middle of the day — but it is the season when northern lights over Sommarøy become the main event.

Should the stunt put you off visiting?

Honestly, no. The campaign was cynical; the island isn’t. Sommarøy is a working fishing village on a cluster of islands about an hour west of Tromsø, with beaches that look lifted from a much warmer latitude and a bridge that’s now mildly famous for the wrong reason. If you walk it today, you may still spot the occasional watch strapped to the railing by visitors playing along with the legend.

The practical takeaway: come for the light, not the lore. In summer, that means planning around the midnight sun — see things to do in Sommarøy for the full list. Getting here is easy by car and awkward by bus (here’s how); without a car, a guided day tour from Tromsø is the realistic way in. And if you want the story straight from the fjords, the Sommarøy fjord tour passes under that bridge.