Norwegian government considers shifting border to gift its Nordic neighbour a peak that would become its highest point

What do you give a country that has 188,000 lakes for a birthday present? Its highest mountain back, obviously.

Norway’s government has confirmed that for the centenary of Finland’s independence next year it is considering moving the border, gifting its Nordic neighbour a mountain peak that would be the country’s highest point.

“There are a few formal difficulties and I have not yet made my final decision,” the Norwegian prime minister, Erna Solberg, told NRK, the national broadcaster. “But we are looking into it.”

At 1,324 metres above sea level, the highest point in Finland currently lies on a bleak mountain spur known as Hálditšohkka, part of a far larger fell known as Halti, more than 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle.

Halti’s summit, at 1,365 metres high, is a kilometre away in Norway. But moving the border barely 40 metres further up the mountainside would put Hálditšohkka’s 1,331-metre summit in Finland – and make the country’s highest point seven metres higher.

“Geophysically speaking, Mount Halti has two peaks, one Finnish and one Norwegian,” NRK explained to bemused viewers earlier this year. “What is proposed is that Norway gives the Finnish peak to Finland, because it is currently in Norway.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A general view of Halti, on the Finnish and Norwegian borders. Photograph: Mikko Stig/AP

The peak “would be a wonderful gift to our sister nation”, said the mayor of Kåfjord, Svein Leiros, who with other local politicians has written to the government in Oslo to express enthusiastic support for the plan.

“We want to reach out a hand to our neighbour that we will be able to shake across the summit.” Nor would mountainous Norway actually be losing much, Leiros said: its highest peak is the mighty Galdhøpiggen, at 2,469 metres.

The originator of the idea is a retired geophysicist and government surveyor, Bjørn Geirr Harsson, 76, who learned last year that Finland would celebrate the 100th anniversary of its independence from Russia on 6 December 2017 and recalled being puzzled by the location of the border when he flew over Halti in the 1970s.

Harsson wrote to the ministry of foreign affairs in July 2015, pointing out that the gesture would cost Norway a “barely noticeable” 0.015 sq km of its national territory and make Finland very happy.

The border, a straight line drawn in the 1750s, was “geophysically illogical”, he has since told Norwegian media, and it was unfortunate and unfair for Finland that its highest point was not even a proper peak.

Responding, the foreign ministry said that although it appreciated the suggestion, article 1 of Norway’s constitution unfortunately stipulated that the country is a “free, independent, indivisible and inalienable realm”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shifting the border 20 metres would put the 1,331-metre summit of Hálditšohkka in Finland. Photograph: Alamy

The deputy chair of the parliamentary scrutiny committee, Michael Tetzschner, also told Aftenposten earlier this year that the plan was “bewildering” and “a joke”, stressing the constitution “clearly prohibits the surrender by the state of any part of Norwegian territory to another power”.

But Øyvind Ravna, a law professor at the Norwegian Arctic university, told the paper the constitution did not apply to minor border adjustments, pointing out that Norway’s borders with both Finland and Russia had moved in recent times to reflect changes in riverbeds and the shifting position of sandbanks and islets.

A Facebook page, Halti as anniversary gift, run by Harsson’s son from his home in the US and calling on supporters to allow “Finland, on its centenary, to rewrite both its history and its geography books”, has so far garnered nearly 14,000 likes.

Public reaction has been overwhelmingly positive in both Norway and Finland, with the only objection so far coming from the indigenous Sami community, whose reindeer roam freely across the border and who argue that the land should belong to neither country.

“Who knows?” Harsson told NRK. “It may really happen.”