Finland's industrial lakeside city — saunas, black sausage, and Lenin's hiding spot
Tampere is Finland's second city and the 'Manchester of Finland' — a 19th-century industrial powerhouse built on the Tammerkoski rapids between two massive lakes, Näsijärvi and Pyhäjärvi. The red-brick textile mills that drove the industrial revolution are now museums, galleries, and restaurants; the Moomin Museum (the world's only one) is inside the Tampere Hall; and the city has one of the highest concentrations of public saunas in Finland, including the historic Rajaportti sauna (1906, oldest public sauna still in operation in the country). The distinctly Tampere food — mustamakkara (black…
Tampere was founded in 1779 by King Gustav III of Sweden on the Tammerkoski rapids and grew explosively after 1820 when James Finlayson (a Scottish Quaker engineer) built the first modern factory in the Nordic countries here, powered by the rapids. By the 1860s Tampere was the industrial capital of the Russian Empire's Finnish Grand Duchy — its textile mills employed more workers than any other factory complex in Scandinavia. Vladimir Lenin visited Tampere twice (1905 and 1906) for secret party congresses, and the Lenin Museum on Hämeenpuisto still occupies the workers' hall where he met Stal…