18 Facts About Helsinki

The city is served by the international Helsinki Airport, located in the neighboring city of Vantaa, with frequent service to many destinations in Europe and Asia.

Also, together with Rovaniemi in the Lapland region, Helsinki is one of Finland's most significant tourist cities in terms of foreign tourism.

Little came of the plans as Helsinki remained a tiny town plagued by poverty, wars, and diseases.

The local Helsinki slang developed among Finnish children and young people as a mixed Finnish-Swedish language from the 1890s, and it was influenced by the Russian language, and from the 1950s onwards, slang began to become more Finnish.

Title plant of Helsinki is the Norway maple and the title animal is the red squirrel.

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The Greater Helsinki area is the world's northernmost urban area with a population of over one million people, and the northernmost EU capital city.

Winters in Helsinki are notably warmer than in the north of Finland, and the snow season is much shorter in the capital, due to it being in extreme Southern Finland and the urban heat island effect.

Conversely, Helsinki enjoys long daylight during the summer; during the summer solstice, days last 18 hours and 57 minutes.

Rarely has Helsinki been represented on its own in films, most notably the 1967 British-American espionage thriller Billion Dollar Brain, starring Michael Caine.

Biggest historical museum in Helsinki is the National Museum of Finland, which displays a vast collection from prehistoric times to the 21st century.

The University of Helsinki has many significant museums, including the Helsinki University Museum "Arppeanum" and the Finnish Museum of Natural History.

Many widely renowned and acclaimed bands have originated in Helsinki, including Nightwish, Children of Bodom, Hanoi Rocks, HIM, Stratovarius, The 69 Eyes, Finntroll, Ensiferum, Wintersun, The Rasmus, Poets of the Fall, and Apocalyptica.

The most significant of the metal music events in Helsinki is the Tuska Open Air Metal Festival in Suvilahti, Sornainen.

One of the most significant food culture venues in Helsinki is the general public area known as Teurastamo in the Hermanni district, which operated as the city's slaughterhouse between 1933 and 1992, to which the name of the place refers.

Nationwide food carnival called Restaurant Day has begun in Helsinki and has traditionally been celebrated since May 2011.

In 2009 Helsinki was host of the European Figure Skating Championships, and in 2017 it hosted World Figure Skating Championships.

Air traffic is handled primarily from Helsinki Airport, located approximately 17 kilometres north of Helsinki's downtown area, in the neighbouring city of Vantaa.

In terms of combined liner and cruise passengers, the Port of Helsinki overtook the Port of Dover in 2017 to become the busiest passenger port in the world.