Tampere travel guide

Tampere, Finland - Overview

Tampere is the largest town that is located inland in the Nordic regions of the world.  With a population of 208,000, it is in fact quite large for a Nordic town and its location, a little less than 200 km north of the Finnish capital of Helsinki, shows just how north it is located.  The metropolitan population of Tampere is even larger, with a population approaching 350,000 people.

As far as the town itself is concerned, Tampere is constructed with views that push people to look at various prominent areas.  For example, there is a main street called Hameenkatu running from the east to the west that forms the main thoroughfare of Tampere and this street has the railway station, the major church and some of the best shopping and dining in the city.  It is enough to say that if you spend a lot of time in Tampere, Hameenkatu will be a name you hear quite often in directions you are given to different venues.

While Tampere does have a very large population, another thing that is very likeable about this particular city is that the surface area it covers is not that large.  In other words, the population density is quite high for that particular region, with many buildings that have been built upwards rather than outwards.  This also means that pretty much anything in Tampere that you would want to do is in walking distance of anything else that you would want to do and for people that want to save on transport, this is a fantastic attribute to the city.

In terms of getting to the city however, Tampere is a bit too remote to allow you to walk there.  Fortunately, there is an airport in Tampere known as the Tampere-Pirkkala Airport that has international flights going to London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Riga, Frankfurt, Milan, Dublin and Bremen.  Most of those flights are flown by Ryanair, the famous European discount airline which calls Tampere its hub of operations in Finland.

Other options for getting to Tampere include trains, chartered buses and cars.  All three of these are primarily ways to get from Helsinki to Tampere although in terms of the actual trip it is possible to take all three across Europe and then get off when they end up getting to Tampere.  The choice is ultimately up to you as the city is very well serviced by the transportation options that are available.