Finland holidays

The choice is yours between snow-capped landscapes up north, and beach-ringed islands down south on holidays to Finland.

Crowd-free Finland

If you prefer your holidays to come without crowds, a Finnish getaway might be the answer – despite the fact it’s one of the biggest countries on the continent, its population is one of the smallest. Most locals live in the capital – Helsinki – which is pitched on the southern part of the country’s coastline. You’ll see less footprints the further north you go, where modern cityscapes are replaced by snowy forests and cars are switched for snowmobiles.

The land of a thousand lakes

Finland’s got good-looking genes from top to toe. Its capital’s one of the smartest capitals in Europe, with buildings that look like they’ve been plucked from the set of a futuristic film. Things are more natural the more north you go, where lakes and forests form most of the landscape. Q: Give us your guess on how many lakes you reckon there are in the country? A: There’s more than 180,000 of them – we bet you weren’t even close.

World’s largest archipelago

Finland’s archipelago racks up so many different islands nobody’s quite sure on the exact number it’s home to, but it’s definitely more than 80,000. The lion’s share of islands are split into four groups – the Kotka archipelago, the Helsinki archipelago, the Archipelago Sea and the Kvraken archipelago. The latter was pressed under more than three kilometres of ice during the Ice Age, and ever since the ice melted the land has slowly been returning to its original level – it still rises a few millimetres each year to this day, and scientists reckon it’ll still be on the move 10,000 years from now.