Things to Do in Åland Islands (2026)

Åland Islands · AX

Vaestra Masskaer

Västra Måsskär sits quietly among the hundreds of islands that make up Lemland in Åland's archipelago, a speck of granite and lichen barely large enough to hold a cairn. This is not a place you visit for a café or a museum. It is a place you visit for the feeling of standing on an island where the sea is close on every side and the horizon stretches uninterrupted. The archipelago around Lemland rewards travellers who want to walk, paddle, or simply sit on warm rock and watch the Baltic shift colour with the wind. For those exploring the southern Åland islands by kayak, boat, or shore walk, Västra Måsskär and its neighbours like the tiny islet Marhällan create a scattered constellation of landing points. Each one is an excuse to stop, step ashore, and take in the scale of an archipelago where land is still slowly rising from the sea.

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Island

Åland Islands · AX

Sommaro

Sommarön — shown on maps as Sommaro — is a small, low-key island in the heart of the Åland archipelago, sitting in the calm waters of the Archipelago Sea (Skärgårdshavet) just off the coast of the municipality of Sund, some thirteen kilometres north of Mariehamn, the Swedish-speaking islands' compact capital. It is one of hundreds of rounded, granite-and-sea islands that make up this part of the Baltic, and exactly that quiet, unspoilt ordinariness is its charm. The island is tiny — around 22 hectares in area and roughly 0.9 kilometres long from north to south — yet it lifts some 25 metres above the waterline, enough to give it a real profile against the horizon of the surrounding skerries. There is no ferry, resort or signed trail here: Sommarön is the kind of island you reach under your own power, anchoring in a sheltered cove or slipping past by kayak while exploring the outer archipelago of southern Åland.

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Island

Åland Islands · AX

Brandholm

Brandholm (also written Brändholm) is a tiny, uninhabited islet in the outer Brändö archipelago, in the far north-east corner of Åland. Measuring only about 0.18 km² and rising just a handful of metres above the Baltic, it is one of the countless low granite skerries and wooded holms that dissolve into the sea here — a dot of land to be passed rather than a place with roads, harbours or sights of its own. You are most likely to reach Brandholm's neighbourhood by kayak, sailboat or the Brändö–Kumlinge ferry line, and its value for a visitor is as part of that wider outer-archipelago experience: calm open water, windswept shores and the deep quiet of an almost empty sea frontier on the Finnish side of the Åland chain.

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Island

Åland Islands · AX

Hoskar

Höskär is a small, uninhabited skerry rising just 12 metres above sea level in the outer southern reaches of the Åland archipelago, at coordinates that place it among the thousands of low granite islets scattered between Föglö and Kökar. The name means "high skerry" in Swedish — a modest elevation that, on this flat and exposed coastline, makes the island visible for some distance across open Baltic water. There are no documented facilities, trails, or settlements on Höskär itself. What it offers is the archetype of the Åland outer archipelago: wind-scoured rock, salt-tolerant vegetation, and the vast openness of the Baltic Sea. For paddlers and sailors exploring the southern skerries, islands like Höskär serve as waypoints, landing spots, and reminders of how little separates solid ground from the sea here.

Museum

Åland Islands · AX

Geta Nostalgia and Car Museum

Out in the green countryside of northern Åland, a few miles from Mariehamn, a group of car- and engine-obsessed friends set out to build themselves a garage and ended up creating one of the islands' most charming offbeat museums. The Geta Nostalgia and Car Museum (Geta Nostalgi och Motormuseum) is a Wild-West-flavoured hall packed with veteran cars, motorcycles, tractors and a tangle of old everyday objects, all assembled with obvious passion and a storyteller's love of the details behind each one. It is not a polished, ticketed institution but a working collector's paradise: some 2,000–2,500 people find their way here each year, drawn by the chance to poke around old metal and hear the owner explain why each vehicle and oddity is worth keeping. If you have even a passing fondness for classic cars, petrol-station memorabilia or the small history of everyday Åland life, this is a delightfully unhurried stop.

Finding your next place…

A little more
of Åland Islands.

Vaestra Masskaer

Sommaro

Brandholm

Hoskar

Geta Nostalgia and Car Museum

Finding your next place…

A little more
of Åland Islands.

Vaestra Masskaer

Sommaro

Brandholm

Hoskar

Geta Nostalgia and Car Museum