Seinäjoki is the capital of Southern Ostrobothnia, a flat-country rail and road hub in western Finland. It is not a picture-postcard old town. Its best reason to stop is modern architecture: Alvar Aalto designed a whole civic centre here, giving the city one of Finland's clearest concentrations of 20th-century design.
The Aalto Centre is compact enough to see on foot from the railway station. Lakeuden Risti, the white "Cross of the Plains" church, anchors the group with a 65-metre tower, while the city hall, library, theatre, state office building, parish centre, and civic square show Aalto thinking at town scale rather than only building scale.
Seinäjoki also has a streak of popular Finnish culture. The Tangomarkkinat festival turns the city into the centre of Finnish tango each July, and Törnävä's old manor area gives the otherwise practical city a softer edge of parks, summer events, and local history.