Live cameras in Hamina, Finland

Hamina is a small, historic town on the coast of the Gulf of Finland in the Kymenlaakso region, about 145 kilometers east of Helsinki and close to the Russian border. About 19,000 people live in the municipality. The town's most striking feature is its plan: after being destroyed in the Great Northern War, it was rebuilt in the 1720s as Fredrikshamn, named for King Frederick I of Sweden, with streets radiating from a central town hall square inside an eight-sided fortress. That circular layout and the fortress bastions survive today. In 1809 the Treaty of Fredrikshamn was signed here, ending the war in which Sweden ceded Finland to Russia. The town also hosts the Reserve Officer School, the military music festival Hamina Tattoo, and one of Google's European data centers on the site of a former paper mill.

What the cameras show

Fintraffic owns the Hamina cameras, and Digitraffic makes them public. They sit at weather stations along main roads, often with views in two or more directions, and send still images several times an hour. Here they mainly follow the E18 motorway, Highway 7, which runs east along the coast from Helsinki past Kotka and Hamina to the Vaalimaa border crossing, along with nearby roads. That corridor carries much of the truck traffic linked to the Port of HaminaKotka, so the views show heavy vehicles as well as weather.

Clocks here read two hours ahead of UTC in winter and three in summer. The coast here gets milder, damper winters than inland Finland, but sea fog, wet snow and icy patches are common from November to March. The shortest days, in late December, offer less than six hours of daylight. In summer the evenings stay light until close to eleven.

Nearby, the port city of Kotka, with its maritime center and Sapokka water garden, is about twenty-five kilometers west, and the islands of the Eastern Gulf of Finland National Park lie offshore.

Sources: Hamina - Wikipedia · Fintraffic Digitraffic - road weather cameras · Visit Kotka-Hamina.