Main page for the series can be found here: Exploring Finland
Join us Exploring Finland! Here are all the posts.
Lahti, or Lahtis in Swedish, is a city in southern Finland. It is the seat of the region of Päijät-Häme and, with around 121.000 inhabitants, is the ninth largest city in Finland. This monolingual Finnish-speaking city is along the shores of Lake Vesijärvi. Lahti is famous for its winter sports, especially cross-country skiing and ski…
Kalajoen Hietasärkät is by many known by the name Kalajoki, the name of the nearby town. These are the long sandy beaches of Kalajoki, stretching along the Baltic Sea coast of the Northern Ostrobothnia Region. These long beaches are at the center of a larger resort area along the coast, with a large camping site,…
Heinola is a town and the seat of the local municipality in the Päijät-Häme Region in southern Finland. It lies just a short drive north of the region’s capital Lahti. This is a unilingual part of Finland, with Finnish as the main language. Around 14.000 of the municipality’s 18.300 inhabitants live in the town. The…
Raahe is a town along the western coast of Finland, in the region of North Ostrobothnia. The town is also known by its Swedish name, Brahestad, from its founder – the Swedish statement and Governor General of Finland, Count Per Brahe the Younger. It is known for being one of only 10 remaining wooden towns…
The village of Nuorgam lies in the far north of Finland, far within the Arctic Circle. Well, this is as far north as you will be able to go in Finland. The village is at the northernmost point of Finland, which also makes it the northernmost village in the European Union. Just on the other…
Varkaus is an industrial town in Northern Savonia in eastern Finland. This is a town that has developed in the vicinity of the paper mills. The town is the seat of the local municipality, a municipality with a population of around 19.700 inhabitants. About 18.300 of the inhabitants live in the town itself. The municipality…
Lakeaharju is a hill in the forests of Vimpeli Municipality in the Southern Ostrobothnia Region of Western Finland. The hill’s peaks reach a height of 175 meters and it is home to a skiing center that was opened in 1976. The ski slopes and the hill offer a view of the lake Lappajärvi, a quite…
Kime is a town in northern Finland, in the Lapland region. It is a town with an important harbor along the coast of the Gulf of Bothna. This is where the river Kemijoki enters the Baltic Sea. This is a monolingual part of Finland, with Finnish being the majority language for the around 19.300 inhabitants….
Tuuri is a village in Alavus Municipality in Western Finland, a part of the Southern Ostrobothnia Region. The village is home to a population of around 780 inhabitants and the second-largest department store in Finland – the Veljekset Keskinen. As a symbol for Tuuri, meaning “luck” in Finnish, a large horse shore stands next to…
Kalajoki is a town along the Finnish coast towards the Gulf of Bothnia, in the Northern Ostrobothnia Region of Finland. Kalajoki is home to around 12.400 inhabitants, and the area is almost unilingually Finnish-speaking. The town is probably best known for the nearby beach resort area of Kalajoen Hietasärkät, attracting visitors from near and far….
Alavus is a town in Western Finland and is the seat of the local municipality with the same name. The town and municipality is also known by its Swedish name Alavo and is part of the Southern Ostrobothnia Region. However, the municipality’s population of around 10.800 is almost entirely Finnish-speaking. Around 4.000 of these people…
Masku is a small town in southwestern Finland, just a few kilometers north of Turku. The name has previously also been spelled as Masko in Swedish, but the around 9600 municipality inhabitants are almost entirely Finnish speaking today, with only 1% having Swedish as their main language. Masku has developed into a smaller commercial center…