The Old Literature Days — Vanhan kirjallisuuden päivät — were first held in 1985, with an association formed the following year to keep them running. Two days, late June or early July, admission free: seminars, exhibitions, book sales and auctions, and children's programming alongside the collectors' end of the trade. The festival hands out the annual Warelius Prize and announces the Book of the Year chosen by Finland's antiquarian booksellers, which is about as niche and as seriously contested as an award can be.

Its chairs have included the diplomat Paul Gustafsson, the former prime minister Kalevi Sorsa and Professor Jukka Sarjala; since 2024 the writer and journalist Matti Rönkä has held the post. The town built on the reputation. Pukstaavi, the Finnish book museum, opened in July 2011 to tell the story of Finnish printing, publishing and reading, and in early 2013 Sastamala began calling itself the Book Capital of Finland. It is a claim staked on a festival rather than a printing industry — which is, if anything, the more interesting way to earn it.

Sastamala as a name is old — it appears in writing around 1300 as Sastamall, in a royal letter — but Sastamala as an administrative entity is younger than the iPhone. It was created on 1 January 2009 from the merger of Vammala, Mouhijärvi and Äetsä, with Kiikoinen joining in 2013. Each of those was itself a composite: Vammala had already absorbed Tyrvää and Karkku in 1973, and Äetsä was formed in 1981 out of Kiikka and Keikyä.

What that leaves is a municipality of 1,531 square kilometres and 23,332 residents at the end of 2025, containing 161 villages, with about two-thirds of its people living outside any built-up centre. Vammala is the administrative heart and holds roughly ten thousand of them. The others keep their own gravity: Pehula and Kiikka, Uotsola in the old Mouhijärvi, Palviala in Karkku, and Kiikoinen. Ask someone where they are from and you may not hear the word Sastamala at all.

In the Karkku district a hill called Pirunvuori rises to 151 metres above sea level, about 93 metres above the water below it. It is the eroded remnant of an ancient volcano: the hard rock of the old volcanic channel simply outlasted everything around it. Along the western edge, enormous boulders have piled into a field of clefts and hollows, the largest of which is Pirunluola, the Devil's Cave. Local tradition populated it with things better left alone and insisted a tunnel ran from it to a manor cellar nearby.

People have been climbing it for the view since the mid-1800s. In 1906 the artist Emil Danielsson built himself a stone studio up there — a kivilinna, a little stone castle — and spent his summers in it for decades. His widow donated the building in 1975; restored, it opened to the public in 1976 and now shows art through the summer months. The hill itself is protected and part of the Natura 2000 network.

The Kokemäenjoki runs through the middle of everything here, and the municipality sits on both banks in the southwest corner of Pirkanmaa. Lakes Rautavesi, Kulovesi and Houhajärvi widen the system into something more like a chain of basins than a river. On the shore of Rautavesi stands St Olaf's Church at Tyrvää, whose own history is dramatic enough to deserve telling separately.

Getting here is easy by Finnish rural standards: Vammala and Karkku both have railway stations, and an InterCity from Tampere reaches Vammala in about forty-five minutes. Ellivuori runs ski slopes above Rautavesi for the months when the lake is hard. And for a place of this size, Sastamala punches implausibly hard at volleyball — VaLePa, founded in 1978, has taken eight Finnish championships, in 2012, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023.