Tourist sites
The city of Viipuri: before the war, Viipuri was the most international city of Finland and, by its number of inhabitants (74,403 in 1939), the second city of Finland. Besides the Finns, there were dynamic Russian, German, Swedish and Jewish communities. Economically and culturally, Viipuri was also an Occidental open door to Saint-Petersburg. Viipuri's castle, built in 1293, still dominates the city.
Suomenlinna: to go to Suomenlinna, a fort island which is just in front of Helsinki, there is, usually, a ferry departing from the marketplace shore (Kauppatori). Leaving behind crowd and gulls screams, the ferry takes you in fifteen minutes to this peaceful island. Suomenlinna was registered on the world patrimony list of Unesco in 1991.
Helsinki: From an architectural point of view Helsinki is a young city. There is nothing left of his first centuries of existence. The only witnesses of the architecture of the city of traders and fortifications of the end of XVIIIth century are the Sederholm's house (1757) in border of the place of the Senate and the Suomenlinna fort island. If the great fire of 1808 destroyed the city, it simultaneously created the necessary conditions for the large-scale works of a city which was promoted to the rank of capital in 1812. The Johan Albrekt Ehrenstrom's town planning established then structures that are still noticeable in the centre of Helsinki. On this plan the architect Carl Ludvig Engel created the monumental centre of neo-classic style called Empire.
Mikkeli's region and surrounding municipalities are to offer sensations able to satisfy the most different tastes. Therefore, near Helsinki, it is still possible to wander in an old manor house and sample some game. People looking for quietness can stay in a hut at the edge of a lake where the only present noises will be the rustle of the wind and the lapping of waves, without giving up the comfort of the urban life. Saimaa, the biggest lake of Finland with pure waters and uncountable islands, attracts the amateurs of physical efforts to either row or fish. It is also worth admiring the rupestral paintings of the stony age and the cultural places of the iron age.
The zone of vestiges of Sammallahti's bronze age in the West of Finland has been listed in the world Patrimony of Unesco. It is the first archeological site that was chosen in Finland. Thirty three tumuli of the bronze age (-1500 - 500) were found there. The deaths were buried under stony heap that could reach important dimensions. Few objects can be found there but they can be full of different structures such as stone circles and sarcophaguses made of stony paving stones.
For more information about tourism
in Finland
, check out the following web site(s) :
Finnish Tourism Board
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