Tampere

Settlers from the west began farming around the Tammerkoski rapids in the 7th century, but the population stayed small for centuries. Markets were held here from the 17th century, and in 1775 King Gustav III of Sweden founded a market town on the rapids, granting it full town rights on 1 October 1779. In 1809 it still had fewer than a thousand inhabitants.

Industry transformed it. In 1820 the Scottish industrialist James Finlayson founded a cotton mill on the rapids, and by 1850 it employed around 2,000 people in a town of 4,000. Paper, flax and engineering works followed, and in 1865 Fredrik Idestam opened a pulp mill on the rapids, the beginning of the Nokia company. The railway arrived in 1876, and the population grew from about 7,000 in 1870 to 36,000 in 1900, when a third of the residents were factory workers and more than half were women. In 1905 Lenin led a conference of Russian revolutionaries in the Workers' Hall, where at a later Bolshevik meeting he first met Stalin.

In the civil war of 1918 Tampere, Finland's leading industrial city, was a key Red stronghold; White forces under Mannerheim took it after the Battle of Tampere on 6 April, capturing about 10,000 Red prisoners. The city was bombed in the Second World War as a railway junction and arms-making centre, passed 100,000 people in 1950 and lost much of its textile industry in the depression of the early 1990s. Technology, the universities and services replaced it: a tram system opened in 2021 and the Nokia Arena the same year, and in 2023 the city won a smart-city prize at a world congress in Barcelona.

Tampere's industrial past gave it the nickname Manchester of the North, which became "Manse" in Finnish and lent its name to Manserock, the Finnish-language rock that grew up here. The city has been officially declared the Sauna Capital of the World for having the most public saunas, and Rajaportti in Pispala, open since 1906, is the oldest public sauna still in use in Finland. The Pispala district also produced writers such as the poet Lauri Viita.

Theatre runs deep: the Tampere Theatre Festival, first held in 1969, is the oldest annual theatre festival in the Nordic countries. Music ranges from Tammerfest's urban rock in July to Blockfest, the largest hip hop event in the Nordic countries, and a strong rock and metal scene. The Moomin Museum shows Tove Jansson's original illustrations, and the cathedral holds Hugo Simberg's frescoes.

Ice hockey is close to a civic religion. Tappara and Ilves are among the most successful clubs in Finland, Ilves becoming the first Tampere team to win the Finnish ice hockey championship, in 1936, and the Hakametsä arena was the first ice hockey arena built in the country; both clubs now play at the Nokia Arena. The rivalry with Turku is kept up mostly through jokes — about mustamakkara, the state of the Aura river and each other's accents.

About 263,000 people live in Tampere, the third most populous municipality in Finland, and about 428,000 in the metropolitan area, the second largest urban area in the country after Helsinki's. Tampere University, formed in 2019 from the merger of the city's university and its university of technology, is the second largest in Finland by enrolment, and students fill districts such as Tammela and Hervanta.

The economy has moved from textiles and heavy industry to technology, engineering, games and services, with the Hermia technology centre in Hervanta at the heart of the tech sector. Unemployment was 9.2 per cent in September 2023. The old mill buildings along the rapids now hold offices, museums and restaurants, and new building continues around the railway station, where the arena stands on a deck over the tracks.

Residents live in apartment blocks in the centre and inner districts, in wooden houses on the Pispala ridge, which is being heavily redeveloped, and in suburbs such as Hervanta, a district of prefabricated blocks home to over 26,000 people. Daily life is shaped by the lakes: swimming and cottages in summer, skating, skiing and ice swimming from the public saunas in winter.

Tampere's signature is mustamakkara, a black sausage made by mixing pork, pig's blood, crushed rye and flour and stuffing it into animal intestines, much like the black puddings of northern England. It is a staple of the jokes Turku people make about Tampere, and the place to eat it is the kiosks at Tammelantori, the market square in Tammela, or at Laukontori by the lake in the centre.

A newer tradition is munkki, fresh sugared doughnuts sold in cafés across the city but most traditionally at the café of the Pyynikki observation tower. In the 1980s the city's old parish dishes were named as mustamakkara, barley bread, potato soup, kotikalja, a home-made small beer, sweetened lingonberry porridge and imelletty perunalaatikko, a sweetened potato casserole.

The Market Hall on Hämeenkatu, opened in 1901, is the centre of food shopping, and about 40 per cent of its outlets are cafés and restaurants. The converted mill buildings around the Finlayson area and along the rapids hold many of the city's restaurants and bars, and Näsinneula's revolving restaurant looks out over Lake Näsijärvi.