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The Kvarken Archipelago is on UNESCO's World Heritage List.
Boat houses by the water

The Man And The Land Uplift Project

The project has been completed as of 31.10.2022.

The main task of the project has been to collect stories from the Kvarken Archipelago World Heritage Area and make these available to visitors. A number of the stories have been collected into an audio guide, which is available to visitors before, during and after the visit to the Kvarken Archipelago. In the terrain, information boards are exposed, which tell about the audio guide and in some cases about the place where the boards are located.

Listen to the audioguide produced in the project here.

The Man And The Land Uplift Project wants to present the culture historical story of the Kvarken Archipelago. The project wants to tell what it is like to live in a landscape that is constantly changing in the Kvarken Archipelago World Heritage area.

The project wants to make cultural history in the area available both digitally and analogously and in this way add another dimension to the guidance in the geological World Heritage. This will be done by producing an audio guide for several points of interest in the area, in English, Finnish and Swedish. The project also includes information boards and other guidance in the terrain in some places.

In the project Man and The Land Uplift, we will write the culture historical story of the World Heritage area. It will then be presented in a comprehensive audio guide for hiking trails, places to visit and special historical sites in and next to the Kvarken Archipelago World Heritage area. The story will also give tourism entrepreneurs and cultural workers product development ideas and aids will be developed to facilitate their work in telling about the World Heritage. Within the project, we will also expand the guidance in the area, for example with more information boards, further develop the Björkö-Panike hiking trail and develop a visitor point in the southern part of the World Heritage area.

– It is through people that we can understand our world or a place, and this also applies to the somewhat difficult-to-understand geology here, says project manager Liselott Nyström Forsén. By taking part in the unique archipelago culture that has emerged here, you can get an emotional relationship to the fantastic landscape. Whether you are an archipelago resident with deep roots in Kvarken’s rocky soil or a newcomer, a summer cottage owner, a visitor from Ostrobothnia or a tourist from far away, the world heritage is everyone’s heritage that we can be proud of and fascinated by.

The reason why more than 1,100 World Heritage sites have been established in the world is to preserve the unique sites for future generations – and that also means that we must preserve the history of previous generations. Therefore, we now want to gather people, associations and organizations with an interest in local and regional history. Then we can together start picking out the pearls in the Kvarken archipelago culture, decide which places the audio guide should tell about and see what needs we have to be able to convey the world heritage area’s cultural-historical story.

– However, it is important to put on the “world heritage glasses”, smiles Liselott Nyström Forsén, and really find that connection between the landscape and culture. For example, the beautiful birch cabinets would not have their characteristic blue color if it were not for the fact that a ship with blue pigment in the cargo ran aground in our treacherously rocky archipelago. And we have the ice age to thank for the rocks, and the land uplift means that they are suddenly where they should not have been.

The Människan och landhöjningen project runs from 1.6.2020 to 31.10.2022 and is funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture, Metsähallitus and KulturÖsterbotten. The project owner is Kvarken World Heritage Association.

For more information, contact info@kvarken.fi or +358 50 3466 200.

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