Travel in Åland: where the road carries on by ferry

Which harbours the Baltic ferries use on Åland

Three harbours take the international ferries, and they face different ways. The Western Harbour lies in Mariehamn itself, Berghamn in Eckerö sits on the western side of the main island group, and Långnäs is on the eastern shore of the main island. Visit Åland listed ferry departures in 2026 from Stockholm, Kapellskär and Grisslehamn in Sweden, from Turku, Naantali and Helsinki in Finland, and from Tallinn in Estonia. Open water of 38 km separates Fasta Åland, the main island, from the Roslagen coast of Sweden, while the ferry distance from Mariehamn is about 160 km to Turku and about the same to Stockholm, according to the English Wikipedia article on Åland.

Statistics and Research Åland (ÅSUB), the islands' statistics office, counts the vessels that arrive at each harbour.

The harbours came out of the pandemic on different paths. ÅSUB's shipping review of 2024 records that at least 2,500,000 passengers a year travelled to or from abroad through Mariehamn from 2005 onwards. From 2020 the figure fell to between 500,000 and 700,000 a year, with 2022 the exception at over 1,200,000, and ÅSUB gives part of the explanation as fewer sailings calling at Mariehamn after the pandemic. Eckerö dropped from nearly 1,000,000 passengers to 400,000 in 2020 and had recovered by 2023, when it carried slightly more than before the pandemic, as it did again in 2024.

For a traveller heading east the effect shows on the departure board. On 26 September 2026 the Visit Åland planner listed twelve departures from Åland to Finland: six from Långnäs, three from Mariehamn, two from Åva in Brändö and a helicopter from Mariehamn to Helsinki flown on demand. Across all destinations the planner counted 55 trips to and from Åland that day.

How car ferries changed the way into Åland

The islands sat on a route between the two shores long before any ferry carried a car. In the 17th century a permanent mail route between Stockholm and Turku was established through Åland, and the summer museum ticket of 2026 still includes the post and customs house at Eckerö.

Car ferry traffic to Mariehamn began in 1959 with the s/s Viking, which ran between Galtby in Finland, Mariehamn and Gräddö in Sweden. She was 99 metres long and took 88 cars. Visit Åland's history of the port describes the growth that followed as explosive: through the 1970s and 1980s a series of large car ferries was built for Åland shipowners, and Viking Line's M/S Mariella measured 177 metres by 28.4 metres when she was launched in 1985. The ships kept growing. Finnlines' Finnsirius, 235 metres long and 33 metres wide, was brought home from the yard at Weihai in China in late summer 2023 with an Åland captain on the bridge.

ÅSUB counts every traveller who arrives. The total was 1,769,000 in 2000 and 2,173,000 in 2010, fell to 679,000 in the pandemic year of 2020 and stood at 1,213,000 in 2025. Of the 2025 arrivals 876,000 came from Sweden, 325,000 from Finland and 12,000 from other countries.

A large share of those people step off only briefly, or stay aboard. Ferries that call at Mariehamn or Långnäs may sell goods tax-free because Åland lies outside the European Union's VAT area, and the English Wikipedia article puts the islands' visitors at about two million a year, most of them staying a few hours during a ferry stopover or a transfer. The economy article covers how that tax border was negotiated and what it earns the shipping companies.

How travellers reach Åland through the archipelago

A slower way in runs from the Finnish side through the islands themselves. Ålandstrafiken, which operates the public archipelago ferries, carries travellers between mainland Finland and Åland by way of small islands, and Visit Åland recommended the route in 2026 for slow travel and for road trips by car or bicycle. Anyone taking a vehicle on it, a bicycle included, has to buy the ticket in advance, either on Ålandstrafiken's website or at its office in Mariehamn.

The departure board for 26 September 2026 shows the two ends of that crossing. The short hop ran from Åva in Brändö to Osnäs in Gustavs in 45 minutes, twice that day. The long one left Långnäs at 09.15 for Galtby in Korpo and took five hours.

Few people arrive this way. ÅSUB counted 39,000 travellers arriving from Finland on the archipelago ferries in 2025, against 77,000 in 2000 and 56,000 in 2010. The islands the route crosses are thinly settled. ÅSUB groups six municipalities as the archipelago, Brändö, Föglö, Kumlinge, Kökar, Sottunga and Vårdö, and together they had 1,990 residents at the end of 2025, down from 2,452 in 1980. Sottunga had 101 on the same date.

Kökar had 211 residents at the end of 2025. The Franciscan order established a monastery on Hamnö in Kökar in the 15th century, and the novelist Ulla-Lena Lundberg has written about the island where she was born. ÅSUB's fleet table for 2025 lists seven archipelago ferries under the Åland and Finnish flag, together about 10,000 gross tonnes.

How Åland's roads and ferries form one network

On the main island group the car decides the trip. Åland had 1,096 km of public roads in 2025, 983 km of them paved, against 888 km with 348 km paved in 1980. Four numbered highways lead to Eckerö, Sund, Lumparland and Geta. Private cars numbered 27,057 in 2025, or 877 for every 1,000 inhabitants, up from 542 per 1,000 in 2000, and 167,718 vehicles arrived on the islands from outside during 2025.

Past the bridges, the road carries on by water. The archipelago ferries carried 930,000 passengers and 441,000 vehicles in 1990 and 1,008,000 passengers and 661,000 vehicles in 2025, so the vehicle count rose by half over those years while the passenger count barely moved. ÅSUB publishes the ferry figures in its transport tables directly beside the road lengths, and a traveller heading for the six archipelago municipalities reads them together.

Cycling has gained new ground. Paved bicycle roads measured 76 km in 2010 and 188 km in 2025. The archipelago ferries take bicycles on the same advance ticket as cars, and ferries from Sweden and Finland carry them too, which Visit Åland lists in 2026 along with cars and motorhomes. Buses numbered 69 in 2025, and Ålands museum points visitors to Kastelholm to the bus timetables of Ålandstrafiken. Traffic keeps to the right, and cars registered on the islands carry the vehicle code AX.

How flights to Mariehamn compare with the ferries

Mariehamn has an airport, and Britannica lists air service from it alongside the car and passenger ferries to Sweden and the Finnish mainland. Visit Åland gave the flight time in 2026 as about 30 minutes from Stockholm Arlanda and from Turku, and about an hour from Helsinki. The same planner listed a helicopter between Mariehamn and Helsinki, scheduled on demand, with a flight of an hour and a half.

Air travel matters to Åland's tax status as well as to its timetables. The exemption that lets ferries sell tax-free goods at Mariehamn and Långnäs covers sales at the airport too, according to the English Wikipedia article on Åland. For the traveller the practical difference is time. A flight of 30 minutes from Turku stands against crossings of 4 hours 10 minutes to 5 hours 25 minutes for the ferries to Turku on the board for 26 September 2026.

When the Åland season opens and closes

Sunshine sets the calendar. ÅSUB recorded 280 hours of sunshine in May 2025, 289 in June and 298 in July, then 228 in August, 172 in September, 104 in October and 22 in December, for 1,903 hours over the year. The July mean temperature for the reference period 1991 to 2020 is 17.0 °C, and February, at minus 2.4 °C, is the coldest month in that normal. The geography article sets out the full station record.

In 2025 hotels took three quarters of their nights between May and September, while guest houses, cottage villages and campsites took more than 90% of theirs in those five months. July concentrated the camping trade most: campsites recorded 46% of their year's nights in that month, guest houses 39% and cottage villages 32%. Hotel occupancy reached 86.9% in July 2025, down from 90.0% in July 2024.

Several fixtures fall inside that window. Kastelholm, the medieval castle first mentioned in 1388, opens as a restored ruin in the summer half of the year. Midsummer Eve falls on the Friday between 19 and 25 June, shops close early that day and some stay closed on Midsummer Day, as Visit Åland advised in 2026. The culture article describes the maypoles raised that evening. The maritime festival Sjödagarna returned to Mariehamn from 31 July to 2 August 2026, and in July 2024 around 60 ships of the Tall Ships Races spent four days in the Western Harbour before sailing the last leg to Szczecin.

Nights spent on business trips rose 14% in 2025 while leisure nights fell, and 12% of hotel nights that year were work-related.

Where visitors to Åland spend the night

Hotels recorded just under 226,000 nights in 2025, 1.5% fewer than in 2024, and nearly four fifths of them were spent in Mariehamn. The town hotels let 45% of their rooms over the year and the hotels in the rural municipalities 24%. Finnish guests spent 84% of their hotel nights in Mariehamn and Swedish guests 74%. Hotel stays lengthened, from an average of 1.7 nights in 2019 to 2.0 in 2025.

The campsites recorded 67,000 nights in 2025, 60% of them in caravans or motorhomes, 23% in cabins and 17% in tents. Swedish guests accounted for more than half of the caravan and motorhome nights, and 46% of all campsite nights, while Finnish guests took 45% of the tent nights. The motorhome counts rose slightly on 2024 and the tent counts fell.

Some visitors sleep aboard their own boats. Åland's 21 marinas had a capacity of 1,324 boats in 2025 and recorded 29,148 nights, up from 21,358 in 2020 and close to the 30,165 of 2000. Others own a cottage. ÅSUB counted 8,565 cottages in 2025, 31.0% of them in the archipelago municipalities, which held about 6% of the population at the end of that year. Visit Åland describes many of the people at the village maypoles as summer Ålanders home for the holidays.

Guests came from 95 countries in 2025. Outside Finland and Sweden, Switzerland accounted for 3,507 nights and the United States for 1,894, and about 1% of all nights were spent by people living outside Europe.

What visitors go to Åland to see and do

What Mariehamn keeps from the sailing ships

The four-masted barque Pommern has lain in the Western Harbour for 50 years, below the Åland Maritime Museum, and Visit Åland put her yearly visitors at more than 40,000 in 2026. She is kept in her original condition as a cargo carrier. Pommern belonged to the fleet of Gustaf Erikson, whose sailing ships carried wheat from Australia to Britain until 1947 and came back to Mariehamn between voyages. Erikson's business archive, 20 shelf metres of letters and papers from 1913 to 1947, entered UNESCO's Memory of the World programme in spring 2023. The museum itself holds a whole captain's saloon taken from the wrecked Herzogin Cecilie.

On the town's eastern shore, Sjökvarteret keeps a boat harbour with a ropewalk, a smithy, a joinery and a rigging workshop. Work on the quarter began in 1904, and most of it was built in the 2000s.

What stands together at Kastelholm

Inland, Kastelholm has three sites in one place. The castle was begun in the 1380s, extended in stages until the 1630s and abandoned after several fires. Beside it stands Jan Karlsgården, an open-air museum laid out as an Åland farm of the 1850s with a dwelling house and many outbuildings, and Vita Björn, the old crown gaol, now a prison museum. Ålands museum sold a summer ticket in 2026 covering the castle and gaol, the Bomarsund visitor centre, the post and customs house at Eckerö and the cultural history and art museums, and the Finnish Museum Card gives free entry to the castle.

How the right of public access works on Åland

The Tourism in Åland article on English Wikipedia lists diving, climbing, paddling, hiking, camping and horse riding among the reasons visitors come, and notes that Visit Åland actively promotes hunting. The Government of Åland reminds visitors that the right of public access lets anyone move freely through the woods and on the water, and that the Åland version differs slightly from the rules in Sweden and in the rest of Finland. It does not spell out the differences on that page.

Nature reserves covered 3,729 hectares of land in 2025, 2.4% of Åland, up from 616 hectares in 1980. Visit Åland promoted fishing trips in 2026. The commercial catch is mostly Baltic herring and sprat, 7,369 of the 7,580 tonnes landed in 2025, with perch at 78 tonnes and pike-perch at 18.

What changes on the crossing from Sweden to Åland

The clock moves forward. Åland keeps Finnish time, listed in the time zone database as Europe/Mariehamn, two hours ahead of UTC and three in summer, and the Swedish shore is an hour behind. When the Visit Åland planner was read on 26 September 2026 it showed 16:01 in Sweden and 17:01 in Finland. The planner gives every time as local, so a crossing from Sweden departs in Swedish time and arrives in Åland time.

The language stays Swedish, which is the sole official language of Åland, and the currency is the euro. Goods are a separate matter. Åland stands outside the European Union's VAT area, and customs duties apply to goods entering the islands.

The calendar follows Finland's. Åland's public holidays include Finnish Independence Day on 6 December, according to Info Norden, and the islands add three flag days of their own: 30 March for demilitarisation and neutralisation, the last Sunday in April for the flag, and 9 June for autonomy.