Beaches in Finland

A coastline that is mostly archipelago — tens of thousands of islands of bare rock rather than sand, with the Baltic freezing solid in winter and icebreakers keeping the ports open. What sand exists is glacial, deposited at the margin of the last ice sheet, and Hanko in the far south has most of it: five kilometres of it behind dunes, on a peninsula that is also the southernmost point of the country. The land is still rising several millimetres a year after the ice, so the coastline is measurably growing. The Åland archipelago, autonomous, Swedish-speaking and demilitarised, lies between Finland and Sweden and holds thousands of islands of its own, reached by a free network of ferries that functions as a public road. Beach season is about eight weeks, and the country's water culture is centred on lakes and saunas as much as on the sea — the sauna at the water's edge, and the swim from it, is the form this takes rather than the sunbed. The right of public access applies to the shore. Practically: mosquitoes are a real consideration in July, the archipelago is best seen from a ferry or a rented cottage rather than from a road, and the winter version of this coast — ice swimming from a cut hole, with a sauna beside it — is a season in its own right rather than an oddity.