The Super-ESCA beamline has been designed for high resolution core level spectroscopy of adsorbates on single crystal surfaces using soft x-ray synchrotron radiation. It receives the light from an 81 period undulator with 5.6 cm period and 4.5 m length in the storage ring ELETTRA. The tunability of this insertion device, at a storage ring electron energy of 2.0 GeV and the connected modified SX700 monochromator allows the performance of experiments at this beamline in the photon energy range 100–2000 eV. This beamline is now operational and first absorption spectra are presented which show available resolving powers varying from 8000 to 3000 for photon energies between 240 and 850 eV.