The Coat of Arms of the President of the Republic of Finland

A quick introduction

Finland is a fairly small country in northern Europe, northeast of the Baltic Sea. Her neighbouring countries are Russia in the east, Norway in the north and Sweden in the west. The local time is East-European time, which is two hours ahead of GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). The surface area is roughly 340 000 sq. km and the population is 5 million. Official languages are Finnish and Swedish.

The climate of Finland is actually warmer that what one might expect from a country laying between the 60' and 70' degrees northern latitude. The warmth is due to the warming effects of the Gulf Stream and the Atlantic Ocean. With their help southern Finland is able to maintain an average July temperature of 17 C and in February an average of -7 C. There are pictures available on the Four Seasons of Finland.

Finland is also known as the country of the Midnight Sun, and indeed, from mid-May until the end of July, the sun never really sets in the northern part of the country. Then in turn, for two months in the mid-winter, the sun never rises above the horizon. Despite this period of darkness, Lapland is a popular tourist resort in the winter. And why not, it is one of the places where you can, for example, see the Northern Lights, or Aurora Borealis as they are also called.

URL: http://www.hut.fi/~juheikki/FINLAND/index.html
Created by Juho Heikkilä on April 4th, 1996
Last update on April 16th, 1996

The lakeview was found anonymous on the net.
The Coat of Arms is from the pages of the President.
The flags of Finland are artwork by Juho Heikkilä.
The map was found on ftp.funet.fi-server.

The maintainer of these pages takes no responsibility for the correctness of the materials found behind links.

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