The Most Beautiful Places in Finland
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Finland are Suomenlinna, Helsinki Central Railway Station and Temppeliaukio Church. The list covers 5 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Finland sits on some of the oldest bedrock in Europe, granite planed smooth by the ice sheets and left scattered with lakes, eskers and low wooded hills. Its built heritage tells the story of a borderland between Sweden and Russia, and of a young nation that turned to architecture to define itself, from national romanticism to the clean modernism Finnish designers became known for.
Suomenlinna, the sea fortress begun under Swedish rule in 1748 on a cluster of islands outside Helsinki harbour, guards the approach to the capital with bastions and grassy ramparts. Olavinlinna, founded in 1475, rises straight from the water between two lakes at Savonlinna, its round towers making it the northernmost medieval stone fortress still standing.
In Helsinki itself, Eliel Saarinen's Central Railway Station, completed in 1919, sets granite giants holding lamps on either side of its entrance under a tall clock tower. A short walk away, the Temppeliaukio Church by the brothers Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen was hollowed out of the bedrock and roofed with a copper dome, its rough rock walls left bare. Inland, the hill of Ukko-Koli looks down over the islands of Lake Pielinen, a view painters of the Finnish golden age turned into a national landscape.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Suomenlinna | Fortress | ✓ |
| 2 | Helsinki Central Railway Station | Railway station | |
| 3 | Temppeliaukio Church | Rock-cut church | |
| 4 | Olavinlinna Castle | Castle | |
| 5 | Ukko-Koli | Scenic viewpoint |
01 Suomenlinna
Finland · 3.7 km from Helsinki60.144° N 24.984° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by marjattacajan from Pixabay Suomenlinna is a sea fortress spread across eight islands at the mouth of Helsinki's harbour, six of them fortified, and it is still a lived-in neighbourhood of the city, with about 900 permanent residents.
Did you know? By 1755 some 7,000 men were working on the fortifications, while Helsinki itself then had only about 2,000 inhabitants.
02 Helsinki Central Railway Station
Finland · 0.9 km from Helsinki60.171° N 24.941° E
Image by RivkahPro from Pixabay Few buildings announce a country's arrival in the modern world as clearly as Helsinki's main railway station. The competition for it was held in 1902, when Finland was still a grand duchy of the Russian Empire, and it was won by the young Eliel Saarinen with an entry titled "A winged wheel standing on a globe".
Did you know? During the First World War the unfinished station served as a military hospital for about 1,000 patients, and its clock tower as a temporary morgue.
03 Temppeliaukio Church
Finland · 1.1 km from Helsinki60.173° N 24.925° E
Link · CC BY 2.5 Helsinki tried three times to build something on this particular outcrop of granite before anything got finished. A competition in the 1930s went nowhere; a second one, won by architect J. S. Sirén, was interrupted when the Second World War started in 1939 and never resumed.
Did you know? About 180 windows form a ring of glass between the rock walls and the copper-lined dome, making the roof seem to float.
04 Olavinlinna Castle
Finland · 1 km from Savonlinna61.864° N 28.901° E
User:Mikko Paananen · CC BY-SA 3.0 Olavinlinna rises straight out of the water. Its grey stone walls and round towers fill a small rocky island in the Kyrönsalmi strait, where the lakes Haukivesi and Pihlajavesi meet in the heart of the Finnish lake district, so that the fortress seems to float on the current.
Did you know? Gustav II Adolf, stopping on his way back from campaigns in Poland in 1622, is the only reigning king known to have visited the castle.
05 Ukko-Koli
Finland63.099° N 29.820° E
Image by 3008133 from Pixabay Ukko-Koli is the summit that gave Finland one of its defining national images: a bare crown of white rock high above Lake Pielinen, with forested islands scattered across the water below and the woods of North Karelia rolling away to the horizon.
Did you know? The glassy white quartzite is sprinkled with tiny needles of kyanite, a metamorphic mineral formed when the old beach sand was buried about ten kilometres deep.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Finland?
- On our list, Suomenlinna ranks first, followed by Helsinki Central Railway Station and Temppeliaukio Church.
- Why does Finland have so many lakes?
- Retreating ice sheets at the end of the last ice age scoured hollows in Finland's granite bedrock and blocked drainage with ridges of gravel, leaving tens of thousands of lakes across the country.
- Who built Suomenlinna?
- Suomenlinna was begun in 1748, when Finland was part of the Swedish realm, to defend Helsinki against Russia. Construction was led by Augustin Ehrensvärd, who is buried on the island.
- How was the Temppeliaukio Church built?
- Designed by Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen and opened in 1969, the church was excavated directly into a granite outcrop, with a copper dome resting on a ring of skylights above the rock walls.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Finland?
- In our collection, the places in Finland are most often rock-cut churches (1), castles (1), fortresses (1) and viewpoints (1).
- How many places are on this list in Finland?
- The list covers 5 places.