Page 653 - (DK Eyewitness) Travel Guide - Europe

SC ANDINA VIA  651

FINLAND

Finland is perhaps the least known of the Nordic countries. Historically,
geographically, and economically, the country straddles East and West, trading
and maintaining links with both Western Europe and the former states of the
Soviet Union. The Finns have a strong sense of national identity, and are rightly
proud of their beautiful unspoiled landscape of forest, lakes, coast, and islands.
About a third of Finland (Suomi in Finnish) Although by nature modest and not
is covered by native pine, spruce, and very practised at marketing themselves,
birch forests. Most of the rest is covered the Finns have achieved much economic
by water – an estimated 188,000 lakes, success, excelling in the fields of
numerous rivers, and extensive areas of technology and design. Nokia and Rovio,
marshland. Finland’s coastline is extremely the games developer (creator of Angry
indented and dotted with thousands of Birds), are some of Finland’s best-known
islands, most of which can be found in success stories in global terms, although
the archipelagos of the southwest. The many people are unaware of their
land is generally flat, apart from Finnish origins.
mountainous areas in Lapland. About
one third of the territory lies within the History
Arctic Circle, where the landscape is Little is known of early Finnish history,
strikingly beautiful, if sometimes bleak. although it is believed that the ancestors
Most of Finland’s towns and cities are of the Sami first arrived in Finland about
found in the southern coastal region, 9,000 years ago. Another group, whose
where they vie for space with extensive language evolved into modern Finnish,
stretches of farmland. The lake district, at arrived some 3,000 years later. In the 1st
the heart of Finland, is not so populous, millennium BC, the arrival of more groups,
but industrialization of the area has been including the ancestors of the present-day
steadily increasing since the mid-20th Finns, forced the Sami to withdraw
century. Northern Finland is still fairly northwards to Lapland.
undeveloped, with small pockets of Even before the beginning of the Viking
Finns inhabiting the south, while the age (8th–11th century AD), Swedes had
Sami (the nomadic people of Lapland) settled on the southwest coast of Finland,
are spread over the far north. and in 1216, Finland became part of

A busy main street in central Helsinki
A group of islands in the Baltic Sea, near Helsinki

650-653_EW_Europe.indd 651 14/07/16 10:20 am