Haparanda (; ) is a locality and the seat of Haparanda Municipality in Norrbotten County, Sweden. It is adjacent to Tornio, Finland. Haparanda had a population of 4,856 in 2010, out of a municipal total of 10,200 inhabitants. Haparanda is located at the northerly extreme of the Swedish coastline, far removed from large cities. Its summers are very mild for a coastal location so far north, and winters are normally not extremely cold in spite of the relative proximity to the Arctic Circle. Haparanda has strong connections to Tornio and the Finnish side of the river and bilingualism of Swedish and Finnish is common although Swedish is the sole official language and the mother tongue of a vast majority of inhabitants. In 2010, it was estimated that 70% of Haparanda's inhabitants spoke Finnish as a second language. Haparanda, for historical reasons, is often still referred to as a "city" despite its small population, although Statistics Sweden only counts localities with more than 10,000 inhabitants as cities. The municipality itself, on the other hand, uses the term (City of Haparanda) not only for the town itself, but for its whole territory (). At 24° 8' E, Haparanda is Sweden's easternmost settlement. History When Sweden ceded Finland to Russia in 1809, the Finnish–Swedish border was drawn along the Rivers Tornio and Muonio. The town of Tornio, located on the island Suensaari in the river delta, became part of the Grand Duchy of Finland within the Russian Empire as demanded by czar Alexander I. (Finland declared independence in 1917). At that time the town of Tornio was dominated by Swedish-speaking merchants and craftsmen, forming a linguistic island in a Finnish-speaking countryside. After the war many of the Swedes started to develop the small village of Haaparanta across the border instead (Haparanda and Tornio are within walking distance), eventually leaving Tornio unilingually Finnish. Haparanda was made a market town (köping) in 1821 and received its city charter in 1842. Into the early twentieth century Haparanda enjoyed commercial and political significance out of proportion to its size because of its position at the mouth of the Torne river at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia. Timber and furs from across northern Scandinavia and Russia arrived by water for shipping on to the rest of the world via the Baltic. Arctic and Antarctic expeditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, including that of Admiral Peary