Helsinki travel guide

For Finns, the capital Helsinki is the gateway to the world -- for visitors, it is the gateway to Finland.

Right on the water it lies, the capital of Finland, with hundreds of offshore islands and reefs. Helsinki is also a city with 590,000 inhabitants, a young, vibrant, and cosmopolitan city - and yet straightforward, charming, and lovable.

Helsinki is a university city and the administrative center as well as a high-tech metropolis. Each neighborhood has its own character, whether in art nouveau Eira and Katajanokka or working-class Kallio. Helsinki offers magnificent facades in the city center as well as maritime history and factory milieu at the northern port, wooden houses in Vallila or dapper Puu Käpylä as well as the new suburbs with modern architecture. The capital continues to grow, is in constant change - old neighborhoods are changing, new ones emerge. In the center is Kamppikeskus, of which one of the currently completed projects is a shopping center and underground bus station; meanwhile, the new industrial port in Vuosaari is under development. And with such change, the nightlife scene changes too: new restaurants, pubs, and clubs, meeting places and trendy bars, trippy design shops find their audience.