Porvoo old and new

Porvoo, Finland's second oldest city, is around an hour by coach from Helsinki, so when the weather was fine one day last October I decided it was time for a visit. It's well and truly on the tourist trail, thanks to the photogenic old town with its red ochre painted wooden shore houses right by the river's edge and its charming streets, small houses, gardens and galleries. Apparently the shore houses, now all painted red, acquired that colour in the late eighteenth century in honour of King Gustav III's arrival from Sweden. Anyway, they make a fine sight.

Porvoo is a pleasant place to stroll around for a couple of hours. So I did that, enjoying wandering round the narrow streets with their little houses and taking in the autumn sunshine. What I saw of the new town , which was largely limited to the streets around the bus station (shown below), was fairly mundane. Maybe a longer visit might have yielded more.