Live cameras in Lohja, Finland

Lohja is a lake town in western Uusimaa, less than an hour west of Helsinki by the E18 motorway. Around 45,000 people live in the municipality, which covers a wide area of forests, farmland and water and calls itself the Lake City. At its center lies Lohjanjärvi, the largest lake in the Uusimaa region, and summer cottages line the shores; Lohja has one of the highest numbers of them of any Finnish municipality. The town has been a local center since the Middle Ages, and the stone Church of St. Lawrence, with its painted medieval walls, is one of the largest of its age in the country. Limestone quarrying shaped the local economy for centuries, and the Tytyri Mine Museum takes visitors deep underground in an old limestone mine. Apple orchards and market gardens also give the area a gentle, rural feel.

The cameras

Around Lohja, the camera network is again Fintraffic's road-weather system, opened up through Digitraffic. A camera sits at each roadside weather station, sometimes looking both ways, and a new frame appears several times an hour. Around Lohja they mostly look along the E18 motorway between Helsinki and Turku, along with regional roads such as Highway 25 toward Hanko and the routes that wind past the lakes. The views show snow cover, ice and visibility rather than town scenes.

Lohja shares Helsinki's time zone, so a winter noon here is ten in the morning in London. Winters are snowy but not as harsh as in the north, and slippery days with freezing rain are common in early winter, which is when the cameras are most useful. Days are short in December, with under six hours of daylight, and very long in June, when the sky stays bright late into the night.

Nearby, the Lohjanharju ridge offers walking trails with lake views, and the Fiskars ironworks village, a popular stop for crafts and design, lies to the southwest near Raseborg.

Sources: Lohja - Wikipedia · Fintraffic Digitraffic - road weather cameras · Tytyri Mine Experience.