Finland

About this destination

Finland (Finnish: Suomi; Swedish: Finland; Sami: Suopma), officially the Republic of Finland, is a country in Northern Europe with 5,518,371 (2017) inhabitants. Finland borders Russia to the east, Norway to the north and Sweden to the northwest. To the south, it is separated from Estonia by the Gulf of Finland. To the west lies the Gulf of Bothnia and to the southwest the Baltic Sea, on the other side of which lies neighbouring Sweden again. The capital is Helsinki, and the second-largest city and urban area is Tampere, which lies about 180 kilometres north of Helsinki. Finland is sometimes called 'the land of a thousand lakes'; in reality there are about 188,000 lakes.