Espoo kicks off jubilee year with large public spectacles

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In 2008, the City of Espoo (pop. roughly 240,000) will be celebrating 550 years since the community became an independent parish entity in 1458.
      Espoo officially took city status only as recently as 1972.
      The jubilee year got off to an early start on December 31st with public gatherings in Espoon Keskus, close to the Espoo Cathedral, parts of which date from the 1480s, and later at the Espoo Arena.
     
Around 7,000 people, including many families with young children, turned out to watch impressive displays of fireworks before they went off to celebrate the New Year with their own pyrotechnics displays.
      The 550-year anniversary will be marked by numerous events over the next 12 months, culminating in the traditional Espoo Day, held in late August.
     
Espoo has been the fastest-growing city in Finland over the past half-century.
      It has expanded dramatically from a sprawling and predominantly Swedish-speaking collection of villages of around 22,000 souls in 1950 to its present size on the back of heavy internal migration from rural areas of Finland, the building of large dormitory suburbs, the establishment of the Helsinki University of Technology on the Otaniemi campus site, and the arrival of numerous companies to set up their headquarters in the city, close to the capital.
      Mobile phone giant Nokia is among the large corporations to have its head office in Espoo.
     
The city surpassed Tampere and Turku, Finland’s traditional second and third cities by population, back in the mid-1990s.
      At around that time, Espoo’s neighbour Vantaa also overtook the former capital Turku to become Finland’s fourth-largest city.


Links:
  City of Espoo website
  Espoo (Wikipedia)
  Espoo 550 Briefly in English

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