Kuninkaantie: the road that made southern Finland
The King’s Road is the oldest thing in this catalogue. It ran from Bergen through Oslo, Stockholm and the Åland Islands to Turku, and on east to Vyborg and St Petersburg — a postal and administrative route rather than a scenic one, which is exactly why every town of consequence on the south coast sits on it.
Inside Finland the road has an older name: Suuri Rantatie, the Great Coastal Road. Autoliitto puts the Finnish portion at about 480 kilometres, Turku to Vaalimaa. The Road Administration measures the historic alignment inside present-day borders at roughly 510 km, only about 70 percent of which survives as public road, split into some fifty separate sections. Both numbers are right; they are counting different things.
The route
West to east: Turku → Kaarina → Paimio → Salo → Perniö → Karjaa → Inkoo → Siuntio → Kirkkonummi → Espoo → Helsinki → Sipoo → Porvoo → Loviisa → Pyhtää → Kotka → Hamina → Virolahti → Vaalimaa.
West of Helsinki the modern approximation is mostly road 110 — the old Highway 1 — with detours onto roads 52, 111, 1050 and 51. East of Helsinki it is almost entirely road 170, the former Highway 7, now running parallel to the motorway and carrying almost no through traffic. That eastern half is the better drive.
Do not look for signs. The Regional Council of Uusimaa, which holds the King’s Road trademark, decided in 2016 to remove all the brown route signage on cost grounds. Navigate by the road numbers.
Stop 1 — Turku
The road historically began at the corner of the Old Town Hall, and Turku Castle — begun in the 1280s, the largest surviving medieval building in Finland — stands at the river mouth a short way west. Turku is the natural first night: it has the airport, the Stockholm ferries and the densest concentration of anything on the western half of the route.
