There is roughly one sauna for every two people in Finland, counting the ones in flats, and going to a public one with strangers is ordinary rather than daring. It is also the single thing most visitors skip out of embarrassment, and skipping it means missing the part of the country that explains the rest.

The sauna rules, since nobody tells you

You wash before going in. You go in naked, in single-sex sections, or in a swimsuit in the mixed ones, and the signs make clear which is which. You sit on a towel, always, because the wood is shared.

Throwing water on the stones is called löyly and anyone can do it, but ask the room first if it is crowded. Sit as long as you want, go out, cool down, come back. Nobody counts and nobody competes.

Löyly on Hernesaari is the modern one, a timber building on the water with a ladder into the sea. Kotiharjun in Kallio has been running on wood heat since 1928 and is the old public sauna, cheap, unglamorous, and full of people who have been coming for forty years. Allas Sea Pool sits next to the market square with three pools, one of them seawater and unheated.

Winter swimming through a hole in the ice is common and it is not compulsory. Nobody will think less of you for staying in the warm.

Temppeliaukio, the rock church

The Suomalainen brothers won the competition to build a church on a granite outcrop in a residential square, and rather than build on the rock, they excavated into it and left the walls raw.

It opened in 1969. The interior is a circle 24 metres across, roofed with a copper dome coiled from 22 kilometres of strip, and daylight comes in through 180 window bars around the rim. Water still seeps down the rock walls into channels.

The acoustics are exceptional, so concerts happen constantly, and the church closes to visitors when one is on. Check the schedule before walking up the hill.

Suomenlinna

The Swedes started building a sea fortress across six islands in 1748 to hold off Russia. It failed at that in 1808, when the commander surrendered without much of a fight in circumstances Finns still argue about, and the Russians held it for over a century.

It is a UNESCO site, about 800 people live on it year round, and the ferry from the market square is part of the city transport network, which means an ordinary day ticket covers it. The crossing takes fifteen minutes.

There are no fences on most of the ramparts. You walk on the walls, into the tunnels with a torch, past a submarine from 1933 in dry dock, and along a shoreline where locals swim in July.

Give it three hours minimum. It is bigger than it looks from the pier and the far end, the King’s Gate, is a forty-minute walk from the ferry.

The design, and the two cathedrals

Helsinki’s centre was laid out from 1812 by Carl Ludvig Engel in pale neoclassical stone, on Russian orders, to look like a small St Petersburg. Senate Square with its white Lutheran cathedral on the steps is the result and it has been standing in for Russian cities in films since the 1960s.

Uspenski, up the hill on the other side of the harbour, is red brick with gold onion domes and is the largest Orthodox church in western Europe, finished in 1868.

The Design District is 25 streets of shops, studios and small museums, marked with black stickers in the windows, and Finnish design here means Marimekko, Iittala glass and Artek furniture rather than souvenirs. The Design Museum on Korkeavuorenkatu holds the Aalto stool and the Fiskars scissors that everyone owns without knowing where they came from.

Kallio, and the two libraries

Kallio was the workers’ district and is now the cheap one, which in Helsinki means bars with normal prices, second-hand shops and the sauna at Kotiharju. It is two metro stops or a twenty-minute walk from the centre.

Oodi, the central library that opened in 2018, is not really a library in the sense most people mean. There are books on the top floor, and below them there are 3D printers, sewing machines, recording studios, a cinema and a workshop full of tools, all free to anyone with a card, and the building is open to anyone at all whether they have one or not. On a cold afternoon it functions as the city’s living room.

The reading room of the National Library, Engel’s domed hall from the 1840s, is the opposite: quiet, gilded, and it lets visitors in on weekdays.

Eating and the market

The old market hall on the waterfront, running since 1889, sells salmon soup, reindeer, cloudberry jam and Baltic herring in a fried sandwich. Fried vendace, small whole fish eaten in handfuls, appear at the outdoor stalls in autumn.

Coffee is the national obsession. Finland drinks more of it per person than any other country, around 12 kilos a year, and it is served light-roasted and filtered rather than as espresso.

Alcohol is expensive and anything above 8 per cent is sold only in state Alko shops, which close in the evening and, since the rules were loosened in 2026, open on Sundays in a few dozen branches rather than none.

Ferries leave for Tallinn most hours of the day and take two of them, which makes a day trip to another country entirely reasonable. Stockholm is an overnight sailing west through the archipelago.

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