Audioguides Seinajoki

Seinajoki is the kind of city architects make pilgrimages to. Alvar Aalto designed its civic heart in one of the most cohesive urban ensembles in Finnish history: city hall, library, theatre, and the soaring Lakeuden Risti church (the Cross of the Plains) arranged together in the flat South Ostrobothnian landscape as though placed by a careful hand. The church's white bell tower is visible for kilometers across the fields. Aalto called it one of his most personal projects.

The Tampere-Vaasa railway arrived here in 1883, and Seinajoki grew into a junction town before it became anything else.

That practical identity still holds. This is a working regional capital of about 67,000 people, the sixth-largest market area in Finland, home to Atria and to a food industry that punches well above the city's size. But every summer the whole calculus changes: Tangomarkkinat draws over 100,000 people to celebrate Finnish tango, which is a distinctly melancholy, accordion-heavy genre that has almost nothing to do with Buenos Aires.