Hanko Beach

Hanko sits at the tip of a peninsula at the southernmost point of mainland Finland, an hour and a half from Helsinki. The town has around thirty kilometres of coastline and, unusually for Finland, most of it is sand rather than rock.

The sand is glacial. Finland's coast is overwhelmingly granite skerry, scraped bare by the last ice sheet; Hanko sits on the Salpausselkä ridge, a moraine deposited at the ice margin around twelve thousand years ago, which left sorted sand where the rest of the coast got stone. The land here is also still rising — isostatic rebound after the ice — by several millimetres a year, so the beach is slowly growing.

The town was a spa resort for Saint Petersburg's wealthy before the revolution, and the wooden bathing villas from that period line the shore. It has also been strategically fought over repeatedly: Hanko was leased to the Soviet Union as a naval base under the 1940 peace treaty and besieged in 1941, and the peninsula is scattered with fortifications. The town's water tower and the wooden villas were largely rebuilt after the 1941 siege, which destroyed much of what stood; the Soviet lease ended when the base was evacuated later that year.

The Baltic here is brackish, shallow and cold, reaching perhaps 18 to 20°C in a good August. The wind is reliable, which has made Hanko Finland's sailing centre; the regatta each July is the largest in the Nordic countries. The peninsula's fortifications are open to walk among, and the ferry to Hangö from the Baltic states once carried emigrants bound for America.

Sand on a coast made of granite, because a glacier left a moraine here twelve thousand years ago. Eighteen to twenty degrees in a good August and eight weeks of it. The wooden bathing villas are from the Saint Petersburg era and the fortifications are from a war fought over this peninsula in 1941.