Every design for Kauhajoki

Two national parks, a basketball club the whole of Finland follows and a museum recalling the winter when the country's Parliament sat here: Kauhajoki carries a good deal for a town in a quiet corner of South Ostrobothnia. Karhu Basket has made the name familiar to every Finnish sports fan, while Lauhanvuori and Kauhaneva-Pohjankangas draw walkers out to the ridges and the wide bogs.

What really sets the town apart is that wartime episode. When the Soviet Union attacked in the Winter War, Parliament was evacuated far from the front and held its plenary sessions in Kauhajoki; the Eduskuntamuseo keeps that story alive. Older layers sit close by in the Kauhajoen kotiseutumuseo, the Museokappeli and Sanssinkartano, an old manor. The town takes its name from the river that runs through it, and its landscape shifts from the open Ostrobothnian plain in the north and west to sandy heaths and forest towards Satakunta in the south.

For people from here, home is the centre of the Suupohja area, where neighbours from the surrounding villages come into town. Picture the river bending through the centre and, beyond it, long flat fields running all the way out to the horizon.