The best time to visit Finland and Lapland

Daylight in Finland

Due to its location in northern Europe with the Arctic Circle crossing the north of the country, parts of Finland experience both extremes when it comes to daylight. The northern quarter of the country (Lapland) has at least one day every year when the sun never sets (usually mid-June) and one day when the sun doesn’t even appear (usually mid-December).

Helsinki in the south has the least extreme daylight hours but still sees a lot more light than most European capitals in the summer and a lot less in the winter. The earliest you are likely to see the sun rise in Helsinki is about 4am in the middle of June, on top of this you can enjoy up to 19 hours of daylight with the sun not setting until just before 11pm. The winter is a very different story, with the latest the sun rises being about 9:30am in late December. The sun sticks around generally for just shy of 6 hours before setting around 3:15pm. After January the daylight increases slowly until June and then beings to decrease.

In Rovaniemi (the capital of Lapland) the story is a bit more intense. In June and most of July you’ll be unlikely to see much darkness. From mid-July the sun rises at about 2am and doesn’t set until about 00:45am. Towards the end of December the sun doesn’t tend to rise until 11:45am and barely sticks around for an hour, setting at 12:32 in the afternoon. As with Helsinki the daylight increases moderately from January to June and then decreases again in the second half of the year.