Ranua

Ranua lies in the forest and lake country of southern Lapland. Sámi inhabitants hunted and fished in the region before Finnish settlers established farms in the sparsely inhabited interior. In the later seventeenth century, people from Ii and Pudasjärvi settled at Kuha, east of Lake Ranuanjärvi, on lands they had previously used as outlying grounds. Settlement remained thin: around the beginning of the eighteenth century the Ranua region had only five inhabited farms.