Raumo

Raumo, or Rauma, is an old harbour town on the Gulf of Bothnia. Its lanes and wooden houses grew around a Franciscan friary, whose stone Church of the Holy Cross contains medieval paintings. The town's merchants and seafarers looked out across the gulf, while its craftsmen worked in the houses and workshops that lined the narrow streets.

Rauma received town privileges in the fifteenth century. The Reformation ended the friary, but its church found a new use after fire destroyed the parish church of the Holy Trinity in 1640. The former monastic church became the Lutheran parish church. Further fires devastated the wooden town in the late seventeenth century, and its inhabitants rebuilt among the old streets. An eighteenth-century town hall later gave the market place a stone civic building amid the wooden quarter.