Hawila Project

…To change mentalities

Hawila is a classic Baltic cargo ship from 1935, all wooden, 32 meters long. She sailed in the ice between Norway and Sweden until the 1950s before becoming a training ship until 2008. It has obtained the status of cultural and historical value, by the Swedish State Maritime Museum. In 2014, abandoned and in poor condition, Hawila caught the attention of a group of friends who decided to refurbish it in a state of the art way. The entire hull of the ship is completely revisited, modernized and secured. The shipyard adopts period techniques and the wood used comes from 200-year-old Danish forests dedicated to shipbuilding.

Grouped in the form of an association on the one hand and a cooperative on the other, the members of Hawila are engineers, carpenters, sailors, artists and come from all over the world: France, Italy, Germany, Greece, Denmark, Canada… All of them are working to restore Hawila to its former glory and to make it a standard-bearer for the ecological transition in maritime transport. As a cargo carrier and a training ship, Hawila will combine these two functions. The project aims to teach the maritime transport of yesteryear and to make it culturally relevant in order to change mentalities and bring it up to date.