Jakobstad's main attraction is Skata, the old wooden town in the western part of the city — one of the best-preserved wooden urban districts in Finland. The 1850 fire destroyed most of the original town, but Skata survived, and its narrow lanes of yellow, red, and cream-painted timber houses give a clear sense of what a prosperous Finnish Gulf coast town looked like two centuries ago. It is quiet, unhurried, and almost entirely untouched by tourism.
Beyond Skata, the town has a Lutheran church with a notable interior, a city museum covering the maritime and cultural history of the bilingual Ostrobothnian coast, and the medieval Pedersöre Church a kilometre south — older than the town itself and one of the finer medieval stone churches in the region.