Beneath the cranes, amidst the port.
Complement your museum experience beside the sea.
Maritime Centre Vellamo contains things you can sense also outside the museum building. The everyday life of the old port area is present, telling the tales of the sea in a fascinating manner.
Five port cranes soar against the sky from the quay. They remind the visitor of the earlier phases of the City Port of Kotka, when train tracks, rail cars, stevedores and seamen filled the quays, and cranes loaded the ships with paper reels and unloaded bags of coffee.
The quay of Maritime Centre still offers a view of the face of industrial Finland in one look: factories with their smoke stacks, high-voltage power lines, light masts, and ships, trains and trucks carrying goods to the port.
The functions of the old port have reduced since the introduction of the Hietanen Harbour in Kotka in 1971 and the Mussalo Deep-Water Harbour in 1989. At the same time, the cranes have turned from tools into memorials and natural parts of the landscape of the port town.
The two newest cranes, the ones standing next to Vellamo, were built by Wärtsilä Oy. The other pair of cranes located a little farther away are by the Francke-Werke Aktiengesellschaft in Bremen, Germany, dating from 1950. The crane with the blue cabin, located farthest from Vellamo, is from 1962 and made by Valmet. The lifting capacity of the cranes varies from 3,000 kilos (blue crane) to 12,000 kilos (the crane standing next to Vellamo).
» Learn more about the tales of the City Port
Outdoor exhibitions − more experiences to be expected
Opposite the main entrance is the outdoor exhibition area of Maritime Centre Vellamo, where the museums operating in the building display larger items from their collections. The outdoor exhibition area will house many types of boats from wooden vessels to more modern sea rescue machinery.
The outdoor exhibition facility is still being planned, and it will open to the public at a later date.
