Insight Guides Pocket Helsinki

Insight Guides

• Publisher: Insight Guides
• ISBN:
  9781786718648
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

Insight Pocket Guides: ideal itineraries and top travel tips in a pocket-sized package. Now with free eBook, and a pull-out map.

Compact, concise, and packed with essential information about Where to Go and What Do, this is an ideal on-the-move companion when you're exploring Helsinki
Covers Top Ten Attractions, including the elegant Senate Square and the extraordinary Rock Church and Perfect Day itinerary suggestions
Offers an insightful overview of landscape, history and culture
Contains an invaluable pull-out map, and essential practical information on everything from Eating Out to Getting Around
Includes an innovative extra that's unique in the market - all Insight Pocket Guides come with a free eBook
Inspirational colour photography throughout
Sharp design and colour-coded sections make for an engaging reading experience

About Insight Guides: Insight Guides has over 40 years' experience of publishing high-quality, visual travel guides. We produce around 400 full-colour print guide books and maps as well as picture-packed eBooks and apps to meet different travellers' needs. Insight Guides' unique combination of beautiful travel photography and focus on history and culture together create a unique visual reference and planning tool to inspire your next adventure.

Where To Go

Helsinki is on an oddly shaped peninsula, nibbled at by the Gulf of Finland, which convolutes itself into numerous inlets, bays and harbours around the edges of the city. Initially, this can be a little disorientating; but you’ll soon find your way around. This is a small capital, and most of its attractions are centrally located. Before striking out independently, it can be worthwhile taking the Panorama Sightseeing Bus Tour (for more information, click here), which gives a good overview of the city’s main sights with a recorded commentary in multiple languages.

Visitors arriving by train or airport bus will be deposited at the Central Railway Station, at the very core of the city. The station sits in the northwest corner of a rectangular area between Mannerheimintie to the west, the Esplanadi in the south, and the Senate Square and Market Hall to the southeast. It is within this rectangle that the majority of Helsinki’s hotels, shops, bars and nightclubs are to be found.

Tram passing by an Art Nouveau building

Helsinki Tourism

Cruise ships dock at one of four harbours: South Harbour, Katajanokka (both around 1.5km/1 mile southeast of the station), West Harbour and Hernesaari (both around 3.5km/2.2 miles southwest of the station). All are linked to the centre by frequent trams or buses.

Most places of interest can be reached comfortably on foot, but if you are footsore or short of time, there’s a good public transport network. This includes a metro (subway) system, although most visitors prefer to remain above ground and use the tram or bus systems, which all converge at Central Railway Station.

It’s hardly worth hiring a car, even if you’re exploring further afield. There are frequent train services to Tampere and Turku, both just under two hours away; and Porvoo can be reached by a short bus ride. Tallinn, in Estonia, on the south side of the Bay of Finland, is linked to Helsinki by high-speed ferry.

Wikström’s solemn figures adorn Helsinki Railway Station

iStock

Rautatientori

The Central Railway Station 1 [map] (Päärautatieasema) is Finland’s most-visited building: more than 200,000 people pass through it each day. Designed by Eliel Saarinen and inaugurated in 1919, it links two of Helsinki’s most prevalent architectural styles, National Romanticism and Functionalism. The monumental structure certainly makes a strong first impression on visitors: sheer pink-granite walls make ants of the hurrying crowds, and the massive, four-sided clock tower is a prominent landmark. The station’s front doors are guarded by four muscular giants, the Lyktbärarna, each holding a translucent lantern. These solemn figures, designed by Emil Wikström, were taken down for a bath in 2013 – a complicated task when even a single head weighs 1.5 tonnes. Commuter and long-distance trains, including trains to Russia, leave from the Central Railway Stations, and the central Metro station lies below it.

Railway Station Square (Rautatientori), to the east of the building, serves as an open-air bus station and has, on its north side, the National-Romantic-style Finnish National Theatre, which has been the theatrical company’s home since 1902. An oversized statue of playwright and novelist Alexis Kivi (1834–72) stands outside. He is now recognised as one of Finland’s greatest writers, although he died in obscurity.

Winter in Helsinki

The nights may be long and the weather bitter, but so what! As the Finns say, “Life gets no better by pulling a face”; and there are plenty of attractions to stave off the winter darkness.

The twinkling fairy lights of St. Thomas Christmas Market fill Senate Square for most of December; the night sky explodes with fireworks on New Year’s Eve; and in early January, the Lux Helsinki light festival makes the city glow – literally.

And of course this is the time for seasonal ice-and-snow fun. The whole of the Railway Square is transformed into an open-air ice-skating rink, IcePark (tel: 040 775; http://icepark.fi; Mon–Fri 2–9pm, Sat–Sun 10am–9pm; charge), while Keskuspuisto (Central Park), just north of the Olympic Stadium, contains 180km (112 miles) of cross-country skiing trails.

When the skies are cold and clear, you can also see the Northern Lights from Helsinki – pick a dark corner of the city and watch for the pulsing, flickering light show.

The National Gallery of Finland is housed in the 19th-century Ateneum

Helsinki Tourism

Ateneum Art Museum

On the south side of Rautatientori, at Kaivokatu 2, is the neoclassical façade of the Ateneum Art Museum, The National Gallery of Finland 2 [map] (Ateneumin Taidemuseo, Suomen Kansallisgalleria; tel: [phone]; www.ateneum.fi; Tue and Fri 10am–6pm, Wed–Thur 10am–8pm, Sat–Sun 10am–5pm; charge). Inaugurated in 1887, it represented a huge investment for a small country, and its collection of more than 20,000 works of art is the largest in Finland. The works of Finnish artists date from the 1750s to the early 1960s (works from 1960 onwards are on display at the Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, for more information, click here). Much-loved national treasures include Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Boy with a Crow (1884) and two pieces inspired by Finnish mythology, Lemminkäinen’s Mother (1897) and the Aino Myth triptych (1891); Hugo Simbert’s enigmatic The Garden of Death (1896) and The Wounded Angel (1903); and several beautiful works by Albert Edelfelt depicting scenes of rural Finnish life. There’s also a small selection of international art (Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Chagall).

Stockmann’s department store 3 [map] (for more information, click here) a Helsinki institution, takes up an entire city block at the junction with Mannerheimintie. The stand-out sculpture here is the Three Smiths statue (1932) by Felix Nylund, depicting three naked blacksmiths hammering on an anvil. If you look carefully around the base, you can still see damage caused by bomb shrapnel, inflicted during the 1944 Continuation War.

Sausage building

The Ateneum’s neighbour is the Makkaratalo (Sausage House), which gained its nickname from the sausage-shaped band encircling the third floor of its raw-concrete exterior. Voted the ugliest building in Helsinki, it is nevertheless protected by the National Board of Antiquities as an example of 1960s Brutalist city planning.

The Esplanadi

The elegant semicircular façade of the Swedish Theatre (Svenska Teatern), dating from 1866, dominates the western end of the Esplanadi 4 [map], Helsinki’s most emblematic park. Two streets – Pohjoisesplanadi (North Esplanade) and Eteläesplanadi (South Esplanade) – run either side of the long, narrow strip of greenery, all the way down to Market Square. Pohjoise...