The town was founded by Per Brahe in 1649 and named after Queen Christina of Sweden, a daughter of Gustavus Adolphus.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, as a busy port for the shipment of tar, Kristiinankaupunki prospered, but thereafter it declined.
Kristiinankaupunki was spared the devastating fires which afflicted so many towns, and there are large numbers of 18th and 19th century wooden houses in the old part of the town.
In Kristiinankaupunki, at a distance of 6 km from the highway 8, between Vaasa and Pori, is situated Pyhävuori - the highest point of the Ostrobothnian.
Pyhävuori in Kristiinankaupunki is one of the oldest slalom slopes in the province.
You can choose between two slopes, one is steep and the other is a good family slope.
Valhalla - Exchange between Finland and Greenland(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
The Nordic Cultural Fund has approved a grant of DKK 50,000 for a cultural exchange programme between Kristiinankaupunki (Kristinestad) in Finland and its twin town, Quaquortoq in Greenland.
Kristiinankaupunki received an invitation from Quaguortog to take part in a culture week and drama workshop and a group of children is now ready to travel to Greenland for workshops along with local kids.
The children will be accompanied by musicians, theatre directors, artists, authors, etc. The group also consists of adults who will perform a Bellman programme and seal hunters from East Botnia.
Groundhog days(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
Kristiinankaupunki was a really pretty sight with small wooden houses and nicely decorated old buildings.
From Kristiinankaupunki we continued towards Pori, which we reached a bit after seven, more than nine hours of travelling.
I unpacked my clothes and sorted out those which I was about to take with me to Turku and Helsinki, unpacked and put together my computer and irced for a while.
In the past decades it used to be common to hear these clusters simplified in speech (resitentti), particularly, though not exclusively, by either rural Finns or Finns who knew little or no Swedish or English.
Even then Southwestern dialects formed an exception: consonant clusters, especially those with plosives, trills or nasals, are common: examples contain place names Friitala and Preiviiki near town Pori, or town Kristiinankaupunki.
Nowadays the overwhelming majority of Finns have adopted initial consonant clusters in their speech.
LEISURE & EDUCATION: At home in a cave during a break from the glaciers(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
No signs of habitation before the glaciation began had ever been found, but now an astonishing series of lucky coincidences has changed all that and led to an archaeological sensation.
Near Kristiinankaupunki on the Gulf of Bothnia in 1996, workers were using an excavator to clean out a big cave called Susiluola (Wolf Cave) and turn it into a tourist attraction.
One of them collected stones as a hobby and happened to notice one, among all the ordinary moraine, that in his view showed signs of having been worked by humans.
Kolovesi National Park is in eastern Savo and is accessible by bus and ferry from Savonlinna.
The most interesting thing to see in idyllic Kristinestad (Kristiinankaupunki in Finnish), founded in 1649, is the town itself, where old customs still survive.
The narrowest street in town, known as Catwhipper's Lane, is only 299cm (118in) wide, making it one of the narrowest streets in Finland.
Karijoki: Susiluola -cave ("Varg grottan"), presumably a dwelling site of Pleistocene man, cave sediment stratigraphy and problems of dating the cave material
Kristiinankaupunki: Harrinkangas, an esker section with Eemian interglacial deposits, soil profile, fluvial and littoral deposits, Weichselian till stratigraphy
Lappajärvi: Meteor impact crater with Saalian deposits, glacial transport of impact material
