Kvarken Archipelago

The Kvarken Archipelago is a UNESCO World Heritage Site straddling the Finnish-Swedish border in the narrowest part of the Gulf of Bothnia, and Vaasa is the main gateway to it on the Finnish side. The archipelago contains more than 5,600 islands, islets, and skerries, many of them low, flat, and marshy — the product of exceptionally rapid post-glacial land rise. Kvarken shares its World Heritage status with the High Coast of Sweden on the opposite shore, the two together forming a textbook case in how landscapes form and change after glaciation.

For visitors, the appeal is bird life, boat trips, and the extraordinary flatness of the landscape. The archipelago is one of the most important waterfowl breeding areas in Finland: eagles, swans, ducks, and waders in large numbers. Several of the islands are accessible by ferry from Vaasa harbour in summer. The M/S Wasa Express ferry also crosses the full width of the strait to Umeå in Sweden, a journey that takes roughly four hours and gives an excellent sense of the archipelago's scale.

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A story
The land here is rising from the sea at roughly 8mm per year — one of the fastest rates of isostatic rebound in the world. The ice sheets that covered Finland until 10,000 years ago weighed so much that they compressed the bedrock; now, freed of the ice, the land is slowly bouncing back. New islands appear, straits become shallows, shallows become meadows. The archipelago is literally growing while you visit it.