Travel and Tourism in Finland

Seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Finland is home to seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites, a collection that reflects the country's rich natural heritage, its distinctive architectural traditions, and its long history as the meeting point of Western European and Eastern European cultures. Each of these sites rewards a dedicated visit and offers a different lens through which to understand the depth and diversity of Finland's cultural and natural inheritance.

Suomenlinna, the sea fortress on the islands outside Helsinki harbor, has already been described at some length in the section on Helsinki. As a UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 1991, it is recognized as an outstanding example of European military architecture that adapted the principles of 18th-century fortification to a unique island setting, and as a living community that has maintained a continuous human presence since the fortress was built.

Old Rauma, on the southwestern coast of Finland, is one of the oldest and best-preserved wooden towns in Scandinavia, its center containing approximately 600 historical buildings in the Nordic wooden architecture tradition. Rauma was a prosperous trading town in the medieval period and continued to flourish through the era of wooden merchant shipping, and the architecture of its historic center, with its colorful painted wooden facades, narrow streets, and market square, preserves a way of life and a building tradition that has largely disappeared elsewhere. Old Rauma was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991.

The Petäjävesi Old Church, in the Central Finland region, is a wooden log church built between 1763 and 1765 that represents a unique synthesis of Renaissance and Gothic architectural traditions translated into the vernacular log building technique of central Finland. The church, which was superseded by a new building in 1879 and preserved by the small village community rather than being demolished, survived as an almost perfectly intact example of Finnish ecclesiastical wooden architecture. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.

The Verla Groundwood and Board Mill, in southeastern Finland near the city of Kouvola, is an exceptional example of a 19th-century rural industrial site that has been preserved virtually intact with its mills, worker housing, and landscape setting. The mill, which produced paper and board from 1872 until 1964, is a reminder of the enormous importance of the forest industry to Finnish economic development and a fascinating document of industrial social history. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.

The Bronze Age Burial Site of Sammallahdenmäki, on the southwestern coast of Finland near Rauma, is one of the most remarkable prehistoric monuments in northern Europe, a complex of 36 stone burial cairns built during the Bronze Age between 1500 and 500 BCE that was used by a community whose culture and beliefs remain largely mysterious. The cairns, some of them extremely large and elaborately constructed, are set in a landscape of open rocky heath that has changed little since they were built, and their preservation is exceptional by the standards of Bronze Age monuments. The site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999.

The Struve Geodetic Arc is a transnational UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 2005 that recognizes a chain of survey points established between 1816 and 1855 by the German-Russian astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve to measure the exact size and shape of the Earth. The arc runs from Hammerfest in Norway to the Black Sea, passing through ten modern countries including Finland, and the preserved survey points, marked by stone monuments, rock carvings, or iron bolt installations in the bedrock, collectively represent one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 19th century and a pioneering application of geodetic science to the understanding of our planet.

The Kvarken Archipelago, shared as a UNESCO World Heritage Site with the High Coast of Sweden and inscribed in 2006, is a remarkable natural site that demonstrates the ongoing process of land uplift that has been reshaping the landscape of the Baltic Sea region since the end of the last Ice Age. As the weight of the glaciers that covered Scandinavia is progressively released, the land is literally rising from the sea, creating new islands and gradually transforming the Kvarken Archipelago's unique landscape of labyrinthine islands, shoals, and channels. The site demonstrates one of the most dynamic geological processes occurring anywhere in Europe and offers extraordinary opportunities for birding, boating, and nature observation.