A beautiful seaside town, 130 kilometers west of Helsinki, Hanko is a bilingual beach-blessed port town of about 10,000 people. Because of its location, Hanko has been contested for more than a thousand years. The Swedes and the Russians fought several battles here in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1809, the Russians took over several Swedish forts.
The town itself wasn’t officially founded until the 1870s and later served as a key transit point for Finns leaving for the United States during the starvation times.
