Concordia Language Villages (CLV), previously the International Language Villages, is a world-language and culture education program. Since beginning in 1961, it has grown to offer summer camp in 15 modern languages and school-year weekend programs mostly for Spanish, French, and German. Summer and winter programs are taught through a language and cultural immersion philosophy, which allows for experience-based learning. The Villages annually serves over 13,000 young people, aged 7–18, from every state of the US, as well as Canada and 31 other countries, and are sponsored by Concordia College of Moorhead, Minnesota, a private four-year liberal arts college of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Villages There are architecturally and culturally authentic village sites (Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Russian, and Spanish) located near Bemidji, Minnesota on Turtle River Lake. There are also leased sites throughout Minnesota, as well as abroad in Switzerland and China. The road connecting the permanent villages at Turtle River Lake to the county road was purposefully constructed to be winding, to simulate the long trip to the target cultures represented at the villages. The original plans for these villages included a train to link all of the villages. Although this idea was scrapped, aspects of it still remain in several buildings. The German village's four-story administration building resembles a German train station and is called the Bahnhof ("train station"). The dining hall at Salolampi, the Finnish language village, is modeled after a famous Finnish train station. Additionally, the Turtle River Lake site has a World Inc. Peace Site with peace poles in the village languages at its heart, near the Norwegian village, Skogfjorden and the Bemidji and Turtle River Lake sites have European road signs in kilometers per hour (imported from Germany, not replications). Several immigrant buildings have been moved to the permanent sites to show villagers what life was like for early European immigrants. The immigrant cabins at the Norwegian village are original to the site. The German "Haus Sonnenaufgang" was first moved from New Ulm, Minnesota to sit next to the Norwegian ones, but was moved sometime in the early 1990s to the German village near Bemidji, Minnesota. CLV consists of 15 villages: German: Waldsee (est. 1961) French: Lac du Bois or Les Voyageurs (est. 1962) Spanish: El Lago Del Bosque (est. 1963) Norwegian: Skogfjorden (est. 1963) Russian: Lesnoe Ozero (Лесное озеро) (est. 1966) Swedish: Sjölunden (est. 1975) Finnish: Salolampi (est. 1978) Danish: Skovsøen