Qualla: Jussarö

Jussarö: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Migro, CC0. The men who dug the first iron out of Jussarö had not chosen to be there. In 1834 the Crown claimed an ore deposit found at the island's northern end, worked out that free labour on a rock in the outer archipelago would cost more than the ore was worth, and sent to Viipuri for forty-five prisoners convicted of irtolaisuus — vagrancy, the offence of having no fixed home or employment. Thirty naval soldiers and their officers came with them as guards. That is how the settlement that would eventually become the only ghost town in Finland got its workforce: men punished for being poor, shipped to an island, and handed picks.

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Image: Migro | CC0

Jussarö: Six Families on the Outer Edge

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mikkoau, CC BY-SA 4.0. Church records put the first permanent residents on Jussarö in 1774, and by the mid-1780s six families were living out here, in the outer belt of the Raseborg archipelago where the islands thin to bare rock and open sea. It is a hard place to be casual about. The surrounding wate...

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Image: Mikkoau | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jussarö: The Crown's Prisoners

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neofelis Nebulosa, CC BY-SA 3.0. Once the mine was running properly, life on Jussarö was organised around the shift. Workers were given potato plots and fishing rights alongside modest wages, and the diligent were rewarded with tobacco and spirits — the incentives of a system that could not pay much and knew it....

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Image: Neofelis Nebulosa | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jussarö: Two Lights

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit H-E Nyman, CC BY-SA 3.0. The reefs still needed marking. A lighthouse went up on the southern tip of Jussarö in 1891 — a white brick tower seventeen and a half metres tall, banded with red — but it developed structural and technical problems and had to be superseded. Its replacement, lit on 20 November 1...

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Image: H-E Nyman | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jussarö: The Second Mine and Its Ruins

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pöllö, CC BY 3.0. A century after the crown quit, the ore drew people back. Oy Vuoksenniska Ab returned to the deposit in the 1950s and began building a modern mine in 1959; the first load of iron ore concentrate left for Koverhar, near Lappohja, in 1961. It lasted six years. Iron prices were fall...

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Image: Pöllö | CC BY 3.0

Jussarö: The Island Now

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Migro, CC0. Jussarö is inside Ekenäs Archipelago National Park, which was designated in 1989 around waters protected as a nature reserve since 1956 and which received the European Diploma of Protected Areas in 1996. Part of the island is open to visitors, reached by a scheduled summer ferry ...

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Image: Migro | CC0