Inari

People lived on the shores of Lake Inari thousands of years before the present village: Stone Age dwelling sites have been found at Vuopaja, beside today's Sámi museum. The village grew up on a route that followed the waterways, at the point where the Juutuanjoki flows into the lake, and over the centuries it became a busy trading and market place for the Inari Sámi. Their winter village lay at Pielpajärvi, where a wooden church built in 1760 still stands in the forest. When Inari municipality was founded in 1876, the village became its centre.

The road from Ivalo reached the village in 1925, and the road to Petsamo on the Arctic Ocean, finished in 1931, opened the region up. The Finnish Tourist Association opened a lodge on the Juutuanjoki in 1937, but retreating German troops burned it late in 1944 during the Lapland War. After the war Finland lost Petsamo to the Soviet Union, and its Skolt Sámi were resettled in Inari municipality. Ivalo grew into the municipal centre, but Inari village did not decline.

For a century and a half gold has been part of village life: prospectors from Lemmenjoki came to buy supplies and meet their fellows, and dozens of them lie in their own plot in the village cemetery. Inari's modern role took shape around Sámi institutions — the Siida museum opened in 1998, and in 2012 the Sajos centre was completed to house the Sámi Parliament, established in 1996.

Inari is widely known as the capital of Sámi culture. The municipality is the only one in Finland with four official languages: Finnish, Northern Sámi with about 700 speakers, and Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi with about 400 each. Inari Sámi is the language traditionally spoken around the lake, and the Sámi Education Institute in the village is one of the few places where anyone can study Sámi languages and culture. In 2019 about 2,100 registered Sámi lived in the municipality, roughly 31 per cent of its people.

Sámi handicraft, duodji, is visible everywhere in the village, alongside a growing number of products made from wood, gold, gemstones, reindeer, berries and herbs. Gákti dress and joik singing are living traditions, and the tourism industry in Finland has been criticised for turning Sámi culture into a marketing tool, so visitors are asked to treat it with respect. The island of Ukko in the lake was an important sieidi, a sacred natural site, possibly used for offerings into the 19th century.

The calendar has two cultural peaks. In late January, in the depth of the polar night, the Skábmagovat indigenous film festival brings filmmakers to the village, and in August the indigenous music festival Ijahis Idja, the "nightless night", fills it with music.

Inari village had about 630 people in its built-up area at the end of 2022, the second-largest settlement in the municipality after Ivalo. The municipality as a whole, the largest in Finland by area at more than 17,000 square kilometres, had about 7,200 inhabitants at the end of 2025 and is one of the most sparsely populated; unusually for Lapland, its population has been growing since 2012, largely thanks to tourism.

Tourism, services and cold-climate testing are the main sources of income. In summer tens of thousands of travellers pass along the main street on their way to the Arctic Ocean, and Siida, Sajos and the craft shops draw many of them in. The Sámi Parliament, the Sámi Archives and the education institute also bring year-round work to the village.

The year swings between extremes of light. From early December to mid-January the sun does not rise, and on clear nights the northern lights fill the sky; from late May to late July it does not set. The lake freezes in late autumn and can hold ice into June, and life moves by snowmobile and ski in winter and by boat in summer.

Lake Inari shapes what is eaten here. Trout, lake salmon, Arctic char, whitefish, grayling, perch and pike live in the lake, and trout, char and grayling are the main catch for the anglers who come to fish its waters and the Juutuanjoki. Fish appears on the menus of the village's restaurants.

Reindeer is the other staple. The best-known dish is poronkäristys, sautéed reindeer, perhaps the most famous traditional meal of Sápmi: the meat is sliced thinly while still frozen, fried in fat, seasoned with black pepper and salt, simmered with a little water, cream or beer until tender, and served with mashed potato. Its Northern Sámi name is báistebiđus.

Coffee is drunk constantly, and outdoors it may be taken from a guksi, kuksa in Finnish, a cup traditionally carved from birch burl as Sámi duodji. Leipäjuusto, a fresh squeaky "bread cheese" made in Northern Finland, is eaten with cloudberry jam, and cloudberries, bilberries and lingonberries are picked in the surrounding forests and mires in late summer.