Map - Nurmijärvi

Nurmijärvi is the most populated rural municipality of Finland, located 37 km north of the capital Helsinki. The neighboring municipalities of Nurmijärvi are Espoo, Vantaa, Tuusula, Hyvinkää and Vihti, and it is part of the Greater Helsinki. The population of the municipality is 0 inhabitants. In recent decades, it has been one of the fastest growing municipalities in the Greater Helsinki and also in whole Finland in terms of population. The close proximity to Helsinki has led to a considerable growth of the major villages such as Klaukkala, Rajamäki and Röykkä. Klaukkala is the biggest built-up area of Nurmijärvi, which nowadays is considered a dormitory town of Helsinki. The Nurmijärvi church village (Kirkonkylä) is the administrative centre of the municipality, although the clear emphasis on population growth is in Klaukkala.

Nurmijärvi literally means "lawn lake" although the lake that gave the municipality its name was drained in the early 20th century and is now nothing more than some flat fields near the village centre. Nurmijärvi is one of three municipalities in the Uusimaa region that do not have a Swedish name; the others are Askola and Mäntsälä.

Matti Vanhanen, former Prime Minister of Finland and current Speaker of the Parliament, lives in Lepsämä in Nurmijärvi.

The area of what is now Nurmijärvi was inhabited in prehistoric times, which refers to archaeological finds dating back to 4500–3500 BC. At the time of the Middle Ages there was no permanent settlement in the area, but later the settlement spread from both Tavastia and the coast to 15 villages in 1540 with 115 houses.

Administratively, Lake Nurmijärvi has been formed by combining the districts of Loppi, Vihti and Helsinki parish. The earliest documentary mention of Nurmijärvi dates back to 1488, when the village of Uotila was mentioned. According to the land register of 1539, Nurmijärvi had 15 villages with a total of 113 houses. An independent congregation had already been formed in 1605 and the administrator of Nurmijärvi was born in 1775, when the area had a population of 1471.

The first church in Lake Nurmijärvi, which must have been St. Martin's Church in 1565, was built at the end of the Middle Ages. It was demolished on the way to a new church, completed in 1692, and the present church, completed in 1793 and designed by master builder Matti Åkerblom, is the third in order.

Lake Nurmijärvi has long been a strong farmer, and the share of fields in the total municipal area is almost one third, which is more than in many other municipalities in Finland. Horticultural crops have also been heavily cultivated and, for example, almost half of the wild cabbage harvest in Finland is produced in Nurmijärvi. Nevertheless, the municipality has not carried out further processing of agricultural products; for example, there has been no dairy.

The first industrial plants were born in the late 19th century, including Finland's first pharmaceutical factory founded by pharmacist Albin Koponen in Nurmijärvi in 1899. The main products of the drug plant were filizine extracted from male fern root rhizomes, which were sold as Diphyllobothrium latum and cestoda medicines called Filisin and Filicon. The factory-produced filicin was sold encapsulated all the way to China and America. Today, trade, transport and other services account for two thirds, industry and construction for less than one third and agriculture for over 3% of the population. The largest individual employers are Altia Oyj and Teknos Oy in Rajamäki, Polimoon Oy in Klaukkala and Korsisaari Oy.

In the early 1960s, the settlement of Nurmijärvi was evenly distributed in different parts of the municipality. However, migration to Nurmijärvi began to accelerate around the middle of the decade and the focus of settlement shifted to the southern parts of the municipality. Already in 1970 the majority (65%) of the inhabitants of Nurmijärvi lived in urban settlements. The largest agglomerations at that time were Klaukkala (3,500 inhabitants), Rajamäki (3,400 inhabitants) and church village (2,800 inhabitants). Of these, the growth of Klaukkala and church village, in particular, has been based almost exclusively on the vicinity of the Helsinki metropolitan area. The most prominent farms on Lake Nurmijärvi have been the manors of Numlahti and Raala. Before the departure of Hyvinkää in 1917, the Kytäjä Manor as well as the whole of the Kytäjä village, were part of the Nurmijärvi parish.