Emperor Alexander II granted Hanko its charter in 1874, when Finland was a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire and the empire wanted a harbour that stayed open. Everything about the town's plan followed from that ambition: the rail line, the quays, the warehouses, the industry that grew up behind them. Geography did the rest. The Hanko Peninsula juts far enough into the Baltic that all coastal traffic has to round it, a chokepoint sailors had been using since the Viking Age. Today the Port of Hanko is the fourth largest in Finland and still very much a working one — container cranes and full-trailer lorries share the peninsula with the beach umbrellas. Helsinki is an hour and a half away by road, which makes the town a plausible day trip and, on certain July weekends, a very crowded one.

The spa opened in 1875, one year after the charter, and Hanko promptly became a resort. Russian families with money to spend arrived by the trainload for sea air and bathing, and the town built for them: wooden villas fretted with carved verandas, corner towers and glassed-in porches, painted in the pale yellows and greens that still line the streets near the water. The Hanko Casino was never a gambling house but a banquet hall, the social centre of the season, and it survives as a restaurant. Then, in 1917, Finland became independent and the Russian revolution ruined the people who had filled those villas every summer. The clientele simply stopped coming. The architecture stayed, slightly too grand for the town around it, waiting for a different century to appreciate it.

For a great many Finns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hanko was the last piece of their country they ever stood on. The port was the departure point of choice for emigrants bound for North America, and the same railway built to move winter freight moved families with everything they owned in one trunk. A monument on the shore marks the spot where they boarded. It is worth pausing at, because the harbour's cheerful summer traffic makes it easy to forget that this water carried people who did not expect to return, and mostly did not.

The Hanko Regatta is the town's main summer event and a fixture of the Finnish social calendar, and it produces a phenomenon the locals have a name for. Beyond the sailors and the genuinely interested there is the *Regattasvansen* — the Regatta tail — the crowd that turns up because everyone else is turning up. Some of them cause a certain amount of trouble. Every bed in town is booked months out; the campsites are the last refuge, since campers never arrive in quite the same peak. The rest of the season is calmer. The Eastern Harbour, *Itäsatama* in Finnish and *Östra hamnen* in Swedish, is the biggest and busiest guest marina in Finland, a forest of masts fringed by restaurants, and a second guest harbour sits on the peninsula's northern shore for anyone wanting less company.

Hanko has around 130 kilometres of coastline and roughly 30 of it is sand — an unusual ratio in a country of granite and reed beds. The beaches run west of town; between the marina and the Casino the shore turns to shingle. Behind them the soil is thin moraine and the forest is low pine and shrub, shaped by wind off open water. At Tulliniemi, land's end, the peninsula narrows to a point that migrating birds use as a launching place before the crossing to Estonia, and the birdwatchers gather accordingly in spring and autumn. Look inland and the skyline is two objects, the church and the water tower, both of which took their present shape after the Second World War because their predecessors did not survive it.