Finland

Ice shaped almost every view in Finland. Retreating glaciers scoured the bedrock and left tens of thousands of lakes, the greatest of them Saimaa, whose maze of islands shelters a freshwater seal found nowhere else. Spruce, pine and birch cover most of the rest. In Lapland bare fells rise towards the Norwegian border under a midsummer sun that does not set. Freed from the ice, the west coast is still lifting slowly out of the Gulf of Bothnia.

For centuries Finland was the eastern part of the Swedish realm. Bishop Mikael Agricola printed the first books in Finnish in the 1540s. Russia took the country in 1809 as a grand duchy, and in 1835 Elias Lönnrot published the Kalevala, an epic gathered from Karelian folk singers that gave the national awakening its voice. Finnish women won the vote in 1906, the first in Europe. Independence came in December 1917, and in 1939–40 and 1941–44 Finland fought the Soviet Union, losing Karelia but keeping its freedom.

Saunas are everywhere, in flats, offices and lakeside cottages, and a summer cabin with a wood-heated one is the classic retreat. Jean Sibelius set the forests to music in Finlandia, Alvar Aalto bent birch plywood into furniture, and Tove Jansson’s Moomins found readers worldwide. Ice hockey is followed fervently. The forests feed pulp and paper mills, Nokia makes mobile network equipment, the shipyard at Turku launches giant cruise ships, and Finnish studios produced Angry Birds.