Lapland

The fells — tunturi — are the defining landform of western and northern Lapland: ancient mountains worn down by successive ice ages into rounded, treeless whalebacks, high enough to be above the tree line but almost never technical to climb. That combination is why Lapland is Finland's serious hiking region rather than merely its wildest one. The country's best-known long-distance trails run through here, marked and maintained, with the open wilderness huts spaced along them at walkable intervals — so a multi-day traverse needs a rucksack and some judgement rather than an expedition budget. The national parks in the fell chain are vast and lightly trodden, and the walking season is short but generous, running from the thaw through to the first snow with the added strangeness of hiking under a sun that does not set. Autumn is the connoisseur's window, when the ground cover turns and the mosquitoes have gone.

Rovaniemi is the region's administrative capital and the arrival point for most visitors: it has the airport, the railhead where the night trains from the south terminate, a university, and a working town centre that was rebuilt in the mid-twentieth century to a plan by Alvar Aalto. It also has the Arctic Circle running through its northern edge, which is the reason the Santa Claus operation sits where it does and posts letters with an Arctic postmark year-round. The town's other serious draw is a large regional museum devoted to Arctic science, culture and how people actually live at this latitude, which is the best single indoor introduction to the region. Further north, the resort villages — the ski-and-safari bases — cluster around individual fells, and the settlements between them are small, spaced far apart, and used to visitors arriving in the dark.

Central and eastern Lapland is the part visitors skip and locals rate. It is forest, bog, lake and river rather than fell, and its distinctive history is gold: a genuine rush in the second half of the nineteenth century drew prospectors north to the river valleys, and the practice never entirely died — there is still a small community panning claims each summer, a gold village museum built around it, and places where a visitor can try a pan and, occasionally, find something. The rivers here are also the region's fishing, with salmon runs on the big northern systems, and one of them forms the border with Sweden along a long stretch, giving a stretch of Lapland the unusual character of a valley shared between two countries with towns facing each other across the water.

Ask most visitors to place Lapland and they will put it entirely inland, which is wrong: the region reaches south to the head of the Gulf of Bothnia and has a genuine sea coast with a port city on it. That coast produces the region's strangest winter attractions, because this is the least salty and shallowest corner of the Baltic and it freezes hard. Icebreaker excursions run out into the frozen sea and let passengers float in survival suits among the broken ice, which is an experience with no real equivalent elsewhere, and a castle is built from snow and ice each winter and melts each spring. In summer the same coast is an ordinary and rather lovely stretch of northern shoreline with long beaches and long light, visited almost entirely by Finns.