Finland's southeast coast is dotted with thousands of islands, which emerged slowly from the water with the retreat of the ice sheet covering Scandinavia. This Finnish archipelago is comparable in beauty to the islands of the Aegean. It stretches from Kimito/Kemiö in the east to Kustavi in the west, at the mouth of the gulf of Bothnia. The inhabitants of the archipelago primarily speak Swedish, and its little villages of wooden houses have hardly changed since the 19C.