Helsinki Audio Tours

Helsinki was founded in 1550 by Swedish King Gustav I as a small trading post but remained a backwater for over two centuries. In 1812, Russian Emperor Alexander I moved Finland's capital here from Turku and commissioned architect Carl Ludwig Engel to redesign the city center from the ground up. Engel built Senate Square, the Helsinki Cathedral, the University of Helsinki's main building, and the Government Palace in matching neoclassical white over three decades, creating a coherent ensemble that still functions as the civic heart of the city. The result earned Helsinki its nickname the White City of the North, and Senate Square remains one of the most architecturally unified public spaces in Northern Europe.

The city occupies a peninsula and 315 islands on the Gulf of Finland, and the islands matter.

Suomenlinna, a sea fortress begun in 1748 and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is reached by a short ferry from the Market Square and functions as an inhabited neighborhood year-round with residents, restaurants, a church, and a winter swimming club. The Helsinki Central Station, designed by Eliel Saarinen in National Romantic style and completed in 1919, is one of Finland's most recognized buildings, its granite facade rising from Kaivopuisto square with a deliberateness that says this is where things begin. The Temppeliaukio Church (1969), quarried directly into granite bedrock with a copper roof and natural light flooding through the dome, is another building that looks like nowhere else.