Qualla: Ekenäs Archipelago National Park

Ekenäs Archipelago National Park: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tomisti, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around the year 1250 a Danish sailing itinerary — a working pilot's manual for crews feeling their way along the Gulf of Finland — recorded a landmark on this coast in Latin as Iuxarae. The name comes down to us as Jussarö. Two of its neighbours, Rödjan and Elgö, appear in the same Danish material from the 1240s. Later clerks wrote Jusar in 1547 and Jussar in 1581, and the rock has been sitting there the whole time, exactly the easily recognised landmark the medieval pilot books describe, with the sound behind it offering the sheltered anchorage it has always offered. Everything else about this place has changed at least twice.

Image: Tomisti | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ekenäs Archipelago National Park: Eighty-Five Per Cent Water

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Migro, CC0. Ekenäs Archipelago National Park was established in 1989 in the outer archipelago off Raseborg, in western Uusimaa, and it covers about fifty square kilometres. Roughly eighty-five per cent of that is sea. What breaks the surface is mostly bare rock — low granite islets scoured s...

Image: Migro | CC0

Ekenäs Archipelago National Park: The Men Who Dug the Island

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Migro, CC0. When Finland passed from Sweden to Russia, the new administration wanted iron of its own rather than Swedish iron on Swedish terms. Ore was located on Jussarö in 1834 and claimed for the crown, and then came the problem: nobody wanted to work there. The island was awkward to reac...

Image: Migro | CC0

Ekenäs Archipelago National Park: Why Some Asked for Siberia

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mvp, CC BY-SA 4.0. The cruelty of Jussarö was administrative rather than theatrical. Men held for vagrancy served indefinite sentences, and in an ordinary prison the way out was to be taken on by a private employer. On an island in the outer archipelago there were no private employers, so the sente...

Image: Mvp | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ekenäs Archipelago National Park: Iron as a Bargaining Chip

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mvp, CC BY-SA 4.0. The mine wound down at the end of the 1850s and stopped in 1861, once better ore became easy to buy and Finnish blast furnaces stopped wanting the Jussarö rock. It stayed shut for the better part of a century. Then in 1954 Vuoksenniska Oy reopened it, and around two hundred miner...

Image: Mvp | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ekenäs Archipelago National Park: The Closed Season

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abc10, CC BY-SA 4.0. For four months of the year, much of this park is simply off limits. From the first of April until the end of July, landing and movement are forbidden on many of the islands so that nesting seabirds and the thin skerry vegetation are left alone; a few islands are closed all year ...

Image: Abc10 | CC BY-SA 4.0