Walking in Finland: Kokkola Old Town Neristan in the Summer

This 4K walk is from a trip to Kokkola I took to attend Kaustinen folk music festival in 2022. The city has a beautiful old town full of wooden houses, called Neristan. It has hundreds of these colourful houses, the oldest from 1700s.

The old town is not only pretty, but small reminders of its long history that has included fires and other changes remain. Porcelain dogs are still kept in some of the windows to remind of the times when men would return from the sea with British porcelain.

When the men were home, the dogs would be looking inside and as they left again, the dogs would be turned to look out of the window to wait for their return. Small mirrors on the side of the windows would allow women to see what was going on in the streets as they were inside working on crafts.

It used to be possible to sail into the city, which made it a prominent market place. Nowadays you can mostly see that from the street names. The houses have been turned into residential buildings, cafes, shops and event spaces.

Historically the more wealthy part of town, Oppistan, "upper town", has actually lost many of its original buildings, so what remains is the "lower part of town".

But the old town has a very special calm feel, especially on a quiet weekday afternoon. To give you an idea of the historical importance of this area, the oldest wooden building that is not a church in a Finnish city can be found here.

This narrated walk is 4K at 60 FPS and was recorded with DJI Pocket 2 on Tuesday 12th July 2022.

Unfortunately some of the trips I talk about on this video never took place as my budget changed, but I do still have some material I hope to publish soon from Singapore too. ❤️

If you would like to join me for future walks, subscribe to know when new videos are published. Feel free to suggest places to visit and thank you so much for joining me for my walks, currently around Finland. :)

00:00 Kokkola railway station
01:14 Rautatienkatu and Rantakatu towards old town
04:57 Neristan old town
25:41 Riverside and market square