Åland Islands

An autonomous, demilitarised and politically neutral region of Finland where the official language is Swedish, the smallest Finnish region by both area and population, with 30,654 people on 1,580 square kilometres. Ninety per cent of them live on Fasta Åland; about 6,500 skerries and islands lie east of it, sixty to eighty of them inhabited. Autonomy came in 1920 and was affirmed by the League of Nations in 1921. Residents are exempt from Finnish conscription. Its only land border is on Märket, an uninhabited skerry it shares with Sweden.