The Arctic city trying to lure tourists with screaming men and air guitar
I once asked a denizen of the Arctic north what people did all day in such frozen latitudes. “In the summer we fish and make love,” she said. And in the winter? “We don’t fish.” The city of Oulu (population of around 200,000) in northern Finland is in the throes of expanding that repertoire in time for its stint as European Capital of Culture 2026.
Located just 60 miles shy of the Arctic Circle, on the northeastern corner of the Baltic Sea, Oulu lies on the delta of the Oulujoki, its downtown a grid of low-rise blocks, its forested hinterlands threaded with cycle tracks. It is probably best known (if known at all) for being the HQ of Nokia and associated tech enterprises such as the Oura “smart” Ring that tells you if you are about to drop dead.
If you attached an Oura Ring to the capital of culture concept it may well indicate the end is near. Thanks to its system of doubling or trebling up, more than 70 cities have held the title since the first, Athens in 1985, including such big hitters as Florence, Paris and Prague.
The idea behind it is to show off a city’s cultural offerings, give the place a facelift, bring in tourists with their cash, and so on. But now that we’re down to cities you may genuinely have never heard of – Tartu (2024), Nova Gorica (2025) and, yes, Oulu, which I had to Google – is it not time to put it out of its misery? I went to Oulu to find out.
I arrived in a balmy period of Indian summer before the onset of a snowbound winter in which the sea freezes over and daylight dwindles to a few murky hours. The first thing to be said is that Oulu is not, as I had assumed, off-puttingly inaccessible – it is a three-hour flight from London Heathrow to Helsinki followed by a further one-hour flight north. And the prices in bars and restaurants are not of eye-watering Scandi magnitude (incidentally, Finns like to point out that they are happy to be called Nordic but are definitely not Scandinavian).
The food is good too, thanks to the city-wide Arctic Food Lab programme that encourages the use of local produce with an emphasis on seasonality and foraging.
So Oulu is do-able if you fancy a short break guaranteed to put hairs on your chest. But is the culture capital tag a sufficient lure?
Oulu’s slogan for 2026 is “cultural climate change” on the basis that they wish to “warm up” perceptions of the city as a tech centre with conservative if not philistine leanings. The indigenous Sami people are welcoming the opportunity to prove that (in the phrase of one Sami artist I met, Reetta Tornensis) “not everyone is a reindeer herder” and while the 2026 programme is still in development, some defining building blocks are already in place – for example, the Air Guitar World Championships which Oulu hosts every August.
Down on the stage by the city’s river delta in 2023, Oulu local Aapo “The Angus” (sic) Rautio thrashed and headbanged his way to runner-up behind eventual champion Nanami “Seven Seas” Nagura of Japan. Pia Alatorvinen, the event organiser, explained the method in the madness: “If everyone played air guitar, war would stop – make air not war!” Out on the frozen sea, the Frozen People festival of electronic music will take place in March. And Oulu’s brilliant Screaming Men Choir (it does what it says on the tin, to great comic effect), will definitely put in an appearance or three, possibly accompanied by avant garde flamenco (yes, really).
If all this sounds a bit off the wall, that’s because it is. Oulu is a place on the edge, with a perspective to match. Everyone I met in Oulu said that far from dreading winter, as we generally do, they relish it. This is partly because they are geared up for it – the heated shopping zone, the vast underground car parking complex (which will be the site of a 2026 installation by Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen), in-home saunas and assiduously cleared cycle lanes – and partly because it suits their introverted, eccentric character.
In the bohemian enclave of Pikisaari island, the designer Païvi Tahkokallio, from Lapland, talked of the “amazing and unique” quality of the light at this latitude, independent of the time of year. The next day, over lunch in a French bistro, the British architect Charlotte Skene Catling made the same point. “Sometimes,” she said, “the light is so intense, because of the snow.”
Skene Catling used to date punk impresario Malcolm McLaren, and there is an appropriately anarchic element to the story of her involvement in Oulu 2026. Searching around on the internet during lockdown, she spotted a building for sale, with a reserve price of just under £5,000 (€6,000), on the Finnish equivalent of Gumtree.
“There’s this crazy thing in the Arctic north,” she told her husband, the artist Adam Lowe. “Shall we put in a bid just for the fun of it?” It was not any old building but one of the earliest works of the world-renowned 20th-century Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto, located in a city she had never heard of. Bidding was in increments of £208 (€250). “Nobody else bid, so for €6,251 [£5,204] we got it,” said Skene Catling. “Then we had to figure out what to do with it.”
Frequently voted Oulu’s ugliest building (to Skene Catling’s chuckling delight), the Aalto Silo is a 92ft concrete behemoth that looks like a cross between a cathedral and a crematorium. It was once a store for wood chips, part of a British-owned cellulose factory that closed down in 1985.
While the silo is being redeveloped as an arts venue and research centre, the plan is to use it for various site-specific events in 2026 (I had a taste on the final evening of the trip when circus artists used it as a backdrop at the annual Aaltosiilo Festival). Skene Catling said that her immediate reaction when she realised she was the proud owner of the Aalto Silo was: “Where is Oulu? What is Oulu?” 2026 is the year for us all to find out.
