Pello (formerly Turtola) is a municipality of Finland. It is located approximately 20 kilometres (12 mi) north of the Arctic Circle in the western part of the province of Lapland, and is part of the Lapland region. The municipality is on the national border with Sweden, by the Tornionjoki-river. The municipality has a population of 3,249 (31 December 2023)^[2] and covers an area of 1,864.66 square kilometres (719.95 sq mi) of which 126.12 km² (48.70 sq mi) is water.^[1] The population density is 1.87 inhabitants per square kilometre (4.8/sq mi).

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Finnish. (June 2023) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Finnish Wikipedia article at [[:fi:Pello]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|fi|Pello}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Quick Facts Country, Region ...

Pello
Municipality
Pellon kunta Pello kommun
Coat of arms
Location of Pello in Finland
Coordinates: 66°46.5′N 023°58′E
Country	Finland
Region	Lapland
Sub-region	Tornio Valley
Charter	1867
Government
• Municipal manager	Sami Baas
Area  (2018-01-01)[1]
• Total	1,864.66 km2 (719.95 sq mi)
• Land	1,738.15 km2 (671.10 sq mi)
• Water	126.12 km2 (48.70 sq mi)
• Rank	35th largest in Finland
Elevation	64 m (210 ft)
Population  (2023-12-31)[2]
• Total	3,249
• Rank	209th largest in Finland
• Density	1.87/km2 (4.8/sq mi)
Population by native language [3]
• Finnish	98.1% (official)
• Swedish	0.6%
• Sami	0.1%
• Others	1.3%
Population by age [4]
• 0 to 14	9.3%
• 15 to 64	49.7%
• 65 or older	41%
Time zone	UTC+02:00 (EET)
• Summer (DST)	UTC+03:00 (EEST)
Website	www.pello.fi

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The municipality is unilingually Finnish, according to the legal definition in Finland.

Konttajärvi is in this municipality.

The name of Pello is ultimately derived from the word pelto, field; which may have been the original name of the village. The weak grade stem of pelto is pello- (e.g. pellon - genitive case form of pelto), through which the name was corrupted to its current form. The name of Turtola refers to a male name Turto, a Finnish form of the Scandinavian name Tord.

During the Late Middle Ages and the 16th century, Pello was the northernmost Finnish village in the Tornio Valley. It was a part of the Tornio parish until 1606, when said parish was divided into Alatornio and Ylitornio, from which the latter included Turtola and Pello.

After Russia conquered Finland in 1809, Ylitornio was split into two parts. The villages of Pello and Turtola were also split, which is why there is a Pello and a Turtola (Svanstein) in Sweden. The northern parts of Ylitornio became a separate parish and municipality in 1867, called Turtola after its most significant village at the time. The village of Pello later surpassed Turtola, thus the municipality was renamed to Pello in 1949.

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