About Ruka Tourism

Ruka Tourism is an independent guide to Ruka, Kuusamo and Oulanka National Park in north-east Finland, for winter and for summer. Patrick Kühne writes and publishes it from Germany, alongside guides to other northern destinations such as Kiruna in Swedish Lapland.

We are not the tourist office

The official tourism organisation for the region is the Ruka-Kuusamo Tourist Association, founded in 2002 by the City of Kuusamo and the larger tourism companies. Its website is ruka.fi, and it runs two tourist information points: Ruka Info in the Kumpare shopping centre in Ruka village and Kuusamo Info in the Karhuntassu visitor centre in Kuusamo.

This site has no connection to that association, to the City of Kuusamo, to Rukakeskus Ltd, which operates the ski resort, or to Metsähallitus, which manages the national parks. Lift tickets, ski bus timetables, trail conditions and event programmes are published by them, and their pages are the reference when something has changed.

How we check the facts

Distances, sun times, temperatures, timetables and dates come from published sources. The main ones are the Ruka-Kuusamo Tourist Association, Metsähallitus, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Finavia, Traficom, the City of Kuusamo and the US Naval Observatory for sunrise and twilight. Where we have worked out a figure ourselves, such as an average from raw weather data or a road distance from a route planner, the page says "about" or "roughly". Every page ends with its list of sources, checked in October 2026.

Sometimes two official pages give different numbers, for example on when Oulanka National Park was founded. Then we use the figure from the authority responsible, or we leave the number out.

Who pays for this site

The tour cards and comparison tables link to GetYourGuide and, for a few tours, to Viator. If you book through one of these links, the platform pays us a commission. You pay the same price as you would without the link. Prices, ratings and review counts are pulled from the platforms and updated automatically; we do not write or adjust them.

We are neither a tour operator nor a travel agency. If you have a question about a booking, contact the platform you booked with or the operator named on the tour card.

Which tours we show

A tour appears here when it starts in Ruka or within reach of it and fits the subject of the page. Day trips that only pick up guests in Rovaniemi are left out. Duration, meeting point, age rules and inclusions are taken from each tour page. If a platform stops selling a tour, it drops off this site without anyone having to remove it.

Photos

The photos come from Unsplash. Some were taken around Ruka and Oulanka, others elsewhere in the north; captions only describe what can be seen and credit the photographer.

Contact

The address and e-mail for this site are in the legal notice.