Helsinki Region Events: Concerts, Theatre, Courses and Free Events

Get upcoming events in the Helsinki region (Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Kauniainen) as one clean table: name, start and end time, venue with address and coordinates, price, ticket link, keywords and status.

The data comes from the Linked Events API of the City of Helsinki (api.hel.fi/linkedevents), the city's own open event database. The city publishes it as open data under CC BY 4.0 for anyone to use, free of charge. This Actor only reads that API. No login, no proxies, no browser.

What you can do with it

• Build an events calendar or "what's on" page for Helsinki, Espoo or Vantaa
• Find free events, courses or hobby groups for a target group
• Track venues and organisers' activity (how many events per venue per month)
• Feed an AI assistant or newsletter with fresh local events
• Plan tourism, marketing or retail campaigns around concerts, fairs and festivals

Input

Field	Description
startDate	First day, YYYY-MM-DD or today (default)
endDate	Last day, YYYY-MM-DD (empty = no end date)
searchText	Word in the event name or description, e.g. jazz, konsertti, kids
municipality	helsinki, espoo, vantaa, kauniainen (empty = whole region)
eventType	General, Course or Volunteering
onlyFree	Only events marked as free
skipCancelled	Leave out cancelled events
venueContains	Text in the venue name or street address, e.g. Kiasma
includeSeries	Also return the parent entry of recurring series (off by default)
language	en (default), fi or sv. Falls back to another language if a text is missing
maxEvents	Stop after this many events (default 200, max 20,000)

Example:

{
    "startDate": "today",
    "endDate": "2026-12-31",
    "searchText": "jazz",
    "municipality": "helsinki",
    "language": "en",
    "maxEvents": 100
}

Output

One row per event. Main fields:

Field	Description
eventId, apiUrl	Id and link to the event in the source API
name, shortDescription	Name and a short description (max 300 characters, e-mail addresses and phone numbers removed)
startTime, endTime	ISO 8601, UTC
status	scheduled, cancelled, rescheduled, postponed or moved_online, as published by the source
eventType	General, Course or Volunteering
isFree, priceText	Free or paid, and the price text as published
ticketUrl, infoUrl	Booking link and the event's own page, when published
keywords	Up to 15 topic keywords
venueName, venueStreetAddress, venuePostalCode, venueCity, municipality, district, latitude, longitude	Venue
languages, minAge, maxAge	When published
isSeries, dataSource, lastModified, license	Technical fields and the attribution text

A run also stores RUN_SUMMARY in the key-value store (events saved, pages read, why it stopped).

Good to know

• Source and licence. Data: City of Helsinki Linked Events, CC BY 4.0. If you republish the data, credit the source; the license field contains the text. Some images in the source have a more limited licence; this Actor does not return images.
• No organiser or contact data. The Actor leaves out organiser, provider and contact fields, and removes e-mail addresses and phone numbers from descriptions. Event names can still contain the names of artists or speakers as published by the source.
• Long-running entries. Permanent exhibitions and weekly hobby groups can have a start date far in the past and an end date far in the future. Use endDate to narrow the period.
• Status. The status field is passed on as the source publishes it. Some publishers use rescheduled as a default value, so check the event page before relying on it.
• Region. Only events that the Linked Events database of the Helsinki region contains. It is not a complete list of all events in Finland.
• Polite access. At most one request per second, the Actor honours robots.txt if the host publishes one (api.hel.fi publishes none today) and stops with a clear message if the API refuses or slows down.
• Cost. You pay for every event returned. Set maxEvents or "Maximum cost per run" to control cost. If the cost limit is reached, the Actor stops and says so.