The Park

The hills and ridges around the park weren’t always here in this shape — they’re glacier-formed, part of the same ancient, undisturbed forest and bog landscape now protected in Salla National Park next door. People found their way onto this land almost as soon as the ice retreated. Stone Age lakeshore camps and rows of old deer hunting pits are still visible in the terrain around Salla today, evidence of hunters working these hills thousands of years before the first marked trail.

From at least the 16th century, this area belonged to the Kuolajärvi siida — a forest Sámi community whose seasonal life combined fishing, hunting, gathering and early reindeer keeping. That rhythm, following the reindeer through the seasons, is the same rhythm you’ll be introduced to on a reindeer safari or in the Kössi Reindeer Program today. Finnish settlers arrived later, clearing slash-and-burn meadows and building hay barns along the streams — traces of both ways of life still survive in the landscape. The municipality itself carried the name Kuolajärvi until 1936, when it was renamed Salla.

Salla’s location on the eastern edge of Finland made it a front line, not once but twice. When the Soviet Union attacked in November 1939, the border here was held by little more than a reinforced field patrol — yet the front stabilised west of what is now Salla village and held until the war’s end. During the Continuation War, Finnish and German forces fought to retake the ceded territory. When the fighting stopped, Finland lost close to half of pre-war Salla — around 5,000 square kilometres and nine eastern villages — to the Soviet Union under the Moscow Peace Treaty. Wartime fortifications from those years are still part of the landscape here, quietly overgrown, a short walk from where you’ll feed reindeer today.

In 1960, a fire swept through the Tuntsa area on both sides of the Finnish-Soviet border — roughly 20,000 hectares burned, making it the largest recorded forest fire in Finnish history. Its marks are still visible on the northern Salla fells: bare rock, fire-scarred trunks, and a forest that is, in places, still visibly younger than the “ancient” woodland just beyond it. It’s a reminder that even a landscape that looks eternal is still being written.

Salla Wilderness Park has its own, much shorter history layered on top of all that. What started around 1996 as Sallan osuuskunta Jotos — a local cooperative offering tourism services as Sallan Poropuisto (Salla Reindeer Park) to Finnish and international visitors — has grown into Salla Wilderness Park Oy, now the region’s nature experience hub and the gateway to Salla National Park. Three decades on, the reindeer herd, the trails and the kotas are still run by people from Salla, for people willing to travel to the middle of nowhere to meet them.