Julia Ajanko, Yara Schutz, Pedro Tamagnini

The Island

Örö island in the Unesco biosphere reserve of the Archipelago Sea Area, SW Finland.

Örö is a long and smallish island (ca. 3000 m N-S and 100 – 1600 m E-W, respectively) in the Archipelago Sea, south-western Finland. It is located in the Archipelago National Park, and belongs even to Unesco’s network of biosphere reserves recognised for its unique natural and cultural characteristics.

Örö has a very special history, because it used to be a closed military area for a hundred years 1915-2014. In 2015 the island was opened for visitors, and since then different tourism services has been developed in Örö.

Southwest Finland has a wide and idyllic archipelago, which covers 10,000 km2 of water and includes over 22,000 islands. There are large and fertile islands in the inner archipelago closer to the mainland, while in the outer archipelago the islands are more scattered, very small and barren. Grazing is important for maintaining the terrestrial ecology of many of the islands. The aquatic ecology of the Archipelago Sea and the Baltic Sea in general is unique yet fragile, threatened especially by eutrophication resulting largely from agricultural practices. The population on all the islands is about 18,000, but the number is greatly increased in the summer months by temporary residents from the mainland who stay at their own ‘summer cottages’ or visit the archipelago temporarily by boats, etc. Traditional livelihoods in the archipelago region include fishing and agriculture, while today tourism is one of the most important sources of income for many.

The project is primarily a tourism development project, but it has other elements as well (community development, economic development, nature solutions). There are 3-6 persons who nowadays live on the island all year around, all of them working with the tourism business. The island is visited by 25 000 people every year. The owner of the island is a state-owned forestry company, whose responsibility is to take care of all the National Parks in Finland. The services in Örö are developed jointly by the state and a private entrepreneur. Örö has a chargeable camping site and the entrepreneur on the island (visitoro.fi) provides a guest harbour, a café,a guide service, restaurant and accommodation services. The island features 6-13 km of marked hiking trails and an exhibition introducing the history and nature of Örö.

Considering the criteria for selecting a project, we believe that the tourism development project on the island of Örö is appropriate given:
- A member of the project team, Julia is from the region and currently lives there, and also knows some of the people running the activities on the island. In that sense, one person of the team would be familiar with the socio-ecological context and able to interview those involved in the project;
- The activities on the island have been developed for about 5 years now and are up and running, so the project can be regarded as completed (while the nature of the tourism require the staff to continuously think of ways to invent new events etc.);
- The missions of both the Unesco biosphere reserves as well as the Archipelago National Park are to advance sustainable development, so development of Örö’s tourism services were initially started with an aspiration for sustainability;
- The project was started with the intention of opening the island for a wider public and bringing the cultural history, guest harbour and related activities into being, with the purpose of enlivening the region, so it has not been about just solving a problem;
- Some of the members running the Örö’s tourism services have expressed their interest in being interviewed and learning more about regeneration, so they would be committed to sharing the thinking that went into it and what our team could learn from the process.

We considered various different projects (a new school development, a regenerative farm and an energy co-operative project) but in the end we decided on this project