Åland Islands

The only town in Åland, founded in 1861 during Russian rule and named after Empress Maria Alexandrovna, has around 12,000 residents and two harbours, one on each side of a narrow peninsula. The West Harbour receives the big ferries from Finland and Sweden; the East Harbour is the guest marina, lined with boat sheds and cafés. Between them runs Esplanadgatan, a long avenue planted with linden trees, and the pedestrian Torggatan with its shops. The town is small enough to cross on foot in twenty minutes and makes the natural base for the whole archipelago.

Ålands museum and Ålands konstmuseum share a building in the centre, telling the islands' story from Stone Age seal hunters through the Viking period and Russian rule to autonomy, with a gallery of Åland painters upstairs.

TipWalk the Sjökvarteret (Maritime Quarter) on the east side, where traditional wooden boats are still built and repaired, and there's a small boatbuilding museum and café.

At the West Harbour lies Pommern, a four-masted steel barque built in Glasgow in 1903. She belonged to the Mariehamn shipowner Gustaf Erikson, whose fleet of square-riggers was among the last to carry grain under sail from Australia to Europe in the 1930s, and she is now one of the few ships of her kind still preserved in original condition. Visitors can explore the deck, the crew's cramped quarters, the captain's saloon and the cargo hold, and get a sense of what months at sea round Cape Horn meant.

Right beside her, the Åland Maritime Museum explains why a small island society became one of the great shipowning communities of the Baltic. Models, figureheads, a reconstructed captain's cabin and personal stories of sailors and their families fill the galleries, and shipping still matters to the local economy today.

TipA combined ticket covers the museum and the ship. Pommern is usually open to visitors in the warmer months only, so check the season before you go.

A few kilometres north of Mariehamn, the grey stone church of St Olof in Jomala is often described as the oldest surviving church in Åland, and possibly in all of Finland; its earliest parts are thought to date from the late twelfth or thirteenth century. Inside are medieval wall paintings and old wooden sculptures. Åland has a dozen or so medieval parish churches, a remarkable number for such a small population, and they make natural stops on any cycling or driving loop.

TipChurches are generally open to visitors in summer. Elsewhere, look out for the churches of Sund, Saltvik, Finström and Hammarland.

At the western tip of the main island, facing Sweden across the Sea of Åland, stands an unexpectedly grand Empire-style building finished in 1828 to designs associated with Carl Ludvig Engel, the architect of central Helsinki. It was a statement by the Russian Empire, which then ruled Finland: the first thing travellers saw on arriving from Sweden was meant to impress. It served the postal route across the sea, along which mail was rowed and sailed, or dragged over the ice in winter, a hazardous duty that local farmers had to perform.

Today it houses a small post museum, art exhibitions, a café and artists' studios. Every summer a race, the Postrodden, recreates the crossing in open wooden boats from Grisslehamn in Sweden to Eckerö.

TipThe Eckerö Linjen ferry from Grisslehamn docks next door, so this is the first sight if you arrive from Sweden by this route.

In the far north of the main island, the Geta hills rise to some of the highest ground in Åland, with granite cliffs dropping to the open sea and wide views over scattered islands. A nature trail leads through pine and juniper to Soltuna, where there's a summer café and lookout point, and on to rocky formations including a large boulder cave known as Grottan. It's a fine half-day hike from the car park and one of the wildest corners of the islands.

TipWear proper shoes: the paths cross smooth rock slabs that are slippery when wet.

Åland's only medieval castle stands on a former islet in an inlet in Sund, about twenty minutes' drive north-east of Mariehamn. First mentioned in the late fourteenth century, it was the seat of Swedish royal administration over the islands, and its partly restored stone halls and towers tell stories of royal visits, prisoners and fires. The ticket also includes the Vita Björn prison museum, a former jail with cells furnished in the style of different eras.

Next door, the free open-air museum of Jan Karlsgården gathers old wooden farm buildings from around Åland: a farmhouse, barns, windmills and a smoke sauna, with a tall Åland maypole at the centre. Its Midsummer celebrations, when the maypole is dressed and raised, are a highlight of the island year.

TipThe castle is open mainly from May to September. There's a golf course and a restaurant nearby, and the medieval church of Sund is just down the road.

Here are the remains of a huge fortress the Russian Empire began building in the 1830s to command the sea routes towards Stockholm. It was never finished: in August 1854, during the Crimean War, a British and French fleet bombarded it and forced it to surrender, then blew up the main fort. The peace settlement of 1856 forbade any new fortifications, the origin of Åland's demilitarised status. The curved granite walls of the main fortress, the remains of towers and the old garrison cemeteries are scattered over several kilometres on either side of the strait, free to explore.

TipA visitor centre at the guest harbour on Prästö, across the bridge, has displays and models explaining what the fortress would have looked like.

Kökar is the outermost inhabited island group in the south-east, a treeless world of bare, pink granite, low heath and narrow inlets, home to a few hundred people. On the islet of Hamnö are the excavated remains of a medieval Franciscan friary, and the white parish church built in the 1780s on its site is a landmark for boats. There are walking routes over the rocks, a local museum, a handful of guesthouses and restaurants, and a deep sense of being at the edge of the open Baltic.

TipÅlandstrafiken ferries reach Kökar from Långnäs on the main island, a journey of a couple of hours through the southern archipelago. Some ferries also link onwards to the Turku archipelago in Finland, so you can island-hop all the way.