Finland

Finland is the country that keeps winning the World Happiness Report while its own citizens shrug and say the survey must be measuring something else. Both things are true. This is a place of very high trust, very good institutions and very little small talk, where the water comes out of the tap cleaner than most bottled water in Europe and where nobody will speak to you on a bus unless the bus is on fire.

It is also enormous and almost empty. 338,455 km² — bigger than Poland, bigger than Italy — holding 5.6 million people, three quarters of whom live in the southern third. Around 75% of the land is forest, the highest proportion in Europe, and there are 188,000 lakes depending on where you draw the line between a lake and a large puddle. A quarter of the country lies north of the Arctic Circle.

The two things visitors come for pull in opposite directions and both work. In winter it is Lapland: darkness, snow, aurora, huskies, reindeer, and a cold that is genuinely serious. In summer it is the lakes: a wooden cottage, a rowing boat, a sauna at the water's edge, and daylight that never fully goes away. Helsinki, which most people treat as a transit lounge, deserves two or three days on its own.

What you should not skip, whichever season you come in, is the sauna. There are around three million of them in a country of 5.6 million people — in flats, in offices, in the parliament building, at petrol stations, on a Burger King in Helsinki. It is not a spa treatment here. It is where Finns are born, in the historical sense, and where they still do the talking they do not do anywhere else.

Finns call their country Suomi and themselves suomalaiset. The word "Finland" is Germanic, arrived from outside, and is what the Swedes called the place. Where Suomi comes from is genuinely unresolved — candidates include a word for the Finns' own name for themselves, a Baltic word for land, and suomaa, "swampland", which Finns enjoy quoting because it sounds appropriately unglamorous.

Flat, forested, wet and long. Finland stretches 1,160 km from the Baltic to the Arctic — roughly the distance from Prague to Naples — and almost all of it is under 200 m above sea level. The land is still rising after the last ice age, gaining a few square kilometres of new coast from the sea each year.

Helsinki sits on the south coast facing Tallinn across 80 km of the Gulf of Finland. Rovaniemi, on the Arctic Circle, is 800 km north of it; Utsjoki, at the top, is another 450 km beyond that. Plan distances in hours, not kilometres — Finland is a long country with excellent but slow-feeling roads.

Finland's history is largely the history of being the ground between two larger powers. For six hundred years it was part of Sweden; for a hundred and eight years it was a Grand Duchy of Russia; and it has been independent since 1917. Understanding that sequence explains most of what the country is like.

Finland's twentieth century turns on three wars with the Soviet Union and the long, careful peace that followed. This is not distant history here — it is the reason for the conscript army, the bomb shelters under Helsinki, the grain reserves, and the near-total absence of naivety about the neighbour to the east.

There are roughly three million saunas in Finland for 5.6 million people. Every apartment block has one; most flats built since the 1990s have their own; offices have them, the parliament has one, the Finnish embassy in Washington has one, and the Burger King in central Helsinki has one you can book. UNESCO listed Finnish sauna culture as intangible heritage in 2020, which Finns found both gratifying and slightly absurd.

This is not a spa. It is closer to a bathroom that people also socialise in. Business gets done in saunas, family arguments get settled in them, and until the mid-twentieth century most Finns were born in one, because it was the cleanest warm room on the farm.

Where to try one as a visitor

Finland has a reputation for reserve that is entirely deserved and almost entirely misunderstood. Finns are not unfriendly. They are unwilling to perform friendliness, which is a different thing, and once the performance requirement is off the table they are among the most straightforward people in Europe to deal with.

Finnish is famously difficult and famously unnecessary. Almost everyone under sixty speaks good English and many speak it extremely well. But knowing what you are looking at makes the country far less opaque.

Most visitors treat Helsinki as an airport with a city attached, which is a mistake. It is a small capital — 660,000 in the city, 1.5 million in the region — built on a peninsula and a scatter of islands, with a neoclassical core, a great deal of good twentieth-century architecture, and a food and design scene that is much better than its reputation.

Finland's outsized reputation in design comes from a specific idea: that good objects should be affordable, useful and available to everyone, not luxury goods. That was a political position as much as an aesthetic one, and it is why Finnish design looks the way it does — plain, warm, wooden and built to survive being used.

Finland has 188,000 lakes and roughly 500,000 summer cottages. From late June the country simply empties — cities go quiet, offices shut, and people go to the water with a rowing boat, a sauna and no particular plan. The mökki is the single most important institution in Finnish leisure and it is defined by what it lacks: usually no road-quality plumbing, often no electricity, and increasingly deliberately no wifi.

A third of Finland, above the Arctic Circle, with 180,000 people in an area larger than Portugal and around 200,000 reindeer. Lapland is what most winter visitors come for, and it delivers — but it is a working region with its own population and its own politics, not a theme park, however hard Rovaniemi's Santa industry tries.

In Finnish Lapland the aurora is visible on roughly 200 nights a year, which sounds like a guarantee and is not — you still need clear skies, darkness and patience. In southern Finland you might see it a dozen times a year. Plan three or four nights minimum, and treat any sighting as luck rather than schedule.

Finnish winter is long, dark and genuinely cold, and the country's answer is to organise almost everything around it. From December to March, Lapland runs on snow: this is the single best-organised winter-activity destination in Europe.

Finns will tell you the summer is short. It is — roughly ten weeks — and it is spectacular. Above the Arctic Circle the sun does not set at all for weeks; in Helsinki in June it barely gets properly dark. The whole country moves outside and stays there.

Jokamiehenoikeus — everyman's right — is the legal principle that anyone may walk, ski, cycle, camp for a night, swim and pick berries and mushrooms on almost any land in Finland, private property included, without asking permission. It is one of the defining facts about the country and it changes how travel here works.

Finland has Europe's largest population of brown bears outside Russia, a small and fiercely protected wolf population, wolverines, lynx and around 200,000 reindeer. Almost nothing here is a threat to you; the exception is a moose on a road at dusk.

Finnish cooking was for centuries the food of a poor northern country: rye, fish, potatoes, milk, whatever the forest gave. That is still the backbone, and in the last twenty years Helsinki has built a genuinely good restaurant scene on top of it — Nordic in method, Finnish in ingredients, and much less precious about it than Copenhagen.

Around 50 million kilos of wild berries ripen in Finnish forests each year and something like five to ten per cent get picked. Everyman's right makes all of it free to anyone, and berry-picking is not a quaint tradition here — freezers across the country are full of it by October.

Coffee first — Finland drinks more of it per head than any country on Earth, roughly 12 kg a year per person, and it is light-roasted, filtered and constant. Then beer, then the state monopoly, then a set of home-made things that have no equivalent anywhere.

Finland's calendar is organised around light: what to do when there is too much of it, and what to do when there is none.

A small, rich, open economy that has reinvented itself twice in living memory — from timber to electronics, and then, after Nokia collapsed, into a diversified technology sector nobody outside the country pays much attention to.

Milder than the latitude suggests, thanks to the Gulf Stream — Helsinki sits level with southern Greenland but has winters like Warsaw's, only longer. The thing to plan for is not the temperature. It is the light.

One of the easiest countries in Europe to reach from Prague and one of the easiest to travel in once you arrive. Direct flights to Helsinki take 2 hours, there is no time difference worth worrying about (+1 hour), both countries are in the EU and the Schengen area, and Finland uses the euro.

Helsinki-Vantaa is a genuinely excellent airport and Finnair has built a business on being the short way between Europe and Asia over the pole. Inside the country, trains are good, buses fill the gaps, and driving is easy in summer and a specialist skill in winter.

Close to frictionless. Everything works, everything is signposted in English, cards are accepted everywhere including public toilets, and public information is accurate. The only real planning problems are the seasons and the alcohol laws.

Expensive, and honestly so — roughly Nordic prices with alcohol and restaurants the worst offenders and transport and accommodation more reasonable than you expect. Lapland in December is a separate and much steeper price list.

One of the safest countries in the world by any measure. Violent crime is rare, corruption is close to non-existent, and the police are trusted and approachable. Essentially everything that can hurt you here is weather or wildlife on a road.

Finland asks very little of visitors beyond behaving the way locals do. But everyman's right is a genuine privilege built on mutual restraint, and Lapland's tourism boom has real costs that are worth being aware of.

I have never been anywhere that is so much better than its own reputation, or so uninterested in correcting it. Finland is marketed abroad as Santa Claus, saunas and the northern lights, and Finns will let you believe that is what the country is, because the alternative would involve explaining themselves, and they would rather not.

What actually got me was the ordinary stuff. A public library in the middle of Helsinki with a sewing room and a 3D printer that anyone can walk into. A wilderness hut two days' walk from a road, unlocked, with dry firewood stacked by someone who left before you arrived and will never meet you. The fact that you can put up a tent on a stranger's land and that this is not a loophole but a right. These are not tourist attractions. They are what a country looks like when it decides that trust is cheaper than enforcement.

Two pieces of advice. First, do not go in November — every Finn will tell you this and every Finn is right. Second, go to a real public sauna rather than a hotel one, take your clothes off, and stay for the second round. Nothing about this country makes sense until you have sat naked in a hot wooden room with strangers who do not feel obliged to talk to you.

And if anyone invites you to their cottage, go. Cancel whatever you had planned. The mökki, the lake, the wood-fired sauna at eleven at night when the sky is still light — that is Finland, and no amount of glass igloo will substitute for it.

— Radim Kaufmann