Travel and Tourism in Sweden

Stockholm: The Beauty of Fourteen Islands

Stockholm is not merely a beautiful city. It is one of the handful of cities in the world whose physical setting is so extraordinarily fine that the city itself becomes a kind of natural spectacle, a work of art created by the collaboration of human ingenuity and the gifts of geography. The city was established on the islands at the outlet of Lake Malaren to the Baltic Sea, a site chosen in the thirteenth century for its defensive qualities and its position at the center of Swedish trade routes, and the water that surrounds it has defined its character ever since. Arriving in Stockholm by train from the west, the first sight of the city across the water, its skyline of church towers and palace facades reflected in the glittering surface of the lake, produces an impression that visitors rarely forget.

Gothenburg: Sweden's West Coast City of Seafood and Style

Gothenburg, Goteborg in Swedish, is Sweden's second largest city and its principal port, a place that is simultaneously a serious industrial center and a city of considerable charm and culture. Located where the Goeta River meets the Kattegat at the southwestern corner of Sweden, Gothenburg was founded in 1621 by King Gustav II Adolf as a trading port positioned to take advantage of the narrow strip of Swedish coastline on the North Sea, the only part of Sweden that gives direct access to the Atlantic trade routes. The city grew rapidly, attracting Dutch engineers and merchants who shaped its early character: the network of canals that still bisects parts of the city center reflects Dutch urban planning traditions.

With a population of approximately 580,000 in the city proper and close to a million in the greater metropolitan area, Gothenburg is considerably smaller than Stockholm, and many Swedes who know both cities prefer Gothenburg for its friendlier scale, its self-deprecating humor, and its less self-consciously sophisticated atmosphere. Gothenburgers have a reputation for being warmer and more approachable than Stockholmers, though this regional stereotype, like all such stereotypes, should be taken with a generous measure of salt.

Liseberg is the most visited tourist attraction in all of Sweden, a remarkable distinction for an amusement park. Founded in 1923 and continuously developed since, Liseberg occupies a large site in central Gothenburg and combines traditional fairground rides, including several major roller coasters, with restaurants, concert venues, gardens, and seasonal events. The Christmas market at Liseberg, held from mid-November through the end of December, is one of the largest in Scandinavia and attracts visitors from across Sweden and neighboring countries.

The Haga neighborhood, just west of the city center, preserves a collection of wooden working-class buildings from the late nineteenth century that have been converted into cafes, artisan shops, and boutiques. This is the place to experience Gothenburg's cafe culture at its most authentic, and in particular to eat the city's legendary cinnamon rolls, which are noticeably larger than those found elsewhere in Sweden: the Haga kanelbulle is an institution in its own right. The narrow, cobblestone lanes of Haga give the neighborhood a village-like character that provides a pleasant contrast to the busier commercial streets of the city center.

The Feskekyrka, or Fish Church, is one of Gothenburg's most distinctive buildings, a nineteenth-century market hall built in a Gothic style with a roofline that genuinely resembles that of a church, standing on the banks of the Rosenlundskanalen. Inside, fish merchants sell the day's catch from the cold waters of the Kattegat and the North Sea: the Swedish west coast seafood, which includes langoustines, mussels, oysters, crayfish, and several species of fish not commonly available elsewhere in Sweden, is considered among the finest in Scandinavia. The west coast of Sweden, with its rocky archipelago and clean cold waters, is the source of Sweden's finest shellfish, and Gothenburg's restaurants make the most of this advantage.

The Gothenburg Museum of Art, Goteborgs Konstmuseum, houses a collection that is particularly strong in Nordic and Scandinavian art from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with works by Carl Larsson, Bruno Liljefors, and the Norwegian painters Edvard Munch and Gustav Fjaestad. The museum also has significant holdings of older European masters and a collection of twentieth-century international art. The Hasselblad Center, named for the Gothenburg company that produced the medium-format cameras used by the Apollo mission astronauts to photograph the Moon, focuses on photography and the visual arts.

The Universeum science and natural history center, which opened in 2001, is one of the best science museums in Scandinavia, with exhibits exploring everything from the deep sea to the rainforest, including a large tropical greenhouse complete with free-flying birds and a replica of a section of Southeast Asian rainforest. The museum is aimed primarily at families and school groups but has much to offer adult visitors.

Gothenburg's archipelago, the Gothenburg Archipelago, offers a very different island experience from Stockholm's, with rocky, wave-washed islands accessed by ferry services from the city center. The islands of Hono, Vrango, and Styrso are among the most popular destinations, offering seafood restaurants, walking trails, and a genuine sense of escape from urban life. The Gothenburg Archipelago is particularly beautiful in summer, when the granite rocks warm in the sunshine and the sea is calm enough for swimming.

The Gothenburg Film Festival, held annually in late January, is the largest film festival in Scandinavia and one of the most important in Northern Europe, attracting filmmakers and industry professionals from across the world. The festival has a particular commitment to Scandinavian and Nordic cinema and has launched the international careers of numerous Swedish filmmakers.

Gothenburg has developed a significant reputation for design and sustainability. The city has been a pioneer in sustainable urban development, investing heavily in public transport, cycling infrastructure, and green building. The Universeum building itself was designed to demonstrate sustainable construction principles. Gothenburg has hosted numerous international conferences on urban sustainability and has been cited as a model for cities seeking to reduce their environmental impact.

Abisko National Park and the Aurora Sky Station

Abisko National Park, situated on the southern shore of Lake Tornetrask about 90 kilometers west of Kiruna, has earned an international reputation as perhaps the single best location in the world for viewing the northern lights. The park sits in a natural rain shadow created by the Norwegian mountains to the west, which causes it to have significantly clearer skies than the surrounding region. A weather station at Abisko has recorded that the sky above the park is clear on average on approximately twenty-nine days per month during the winter, a frequency that is remarkable for any location at this latitude.

The Aurora Sky Station, operated by the Aurora Resort at Abisko, is located on a hillside above the park and accessible by chairlift, offering visitors a clear view of the northern sky from a height that puts them above the low-lying mist and cloud that can obscure the view from lower elevations. The station has comfortable facilities including a heated viewing platform, a cafe, and guided interpretation of the aurora phenomenon. The experience of standing at the Aurora Sky Station on a clear night in January or February, with the temperature far below freezing and the sky blazing with the northern lights, is one of the most memorable in all of Europe.

Abisko is also the starting point of the Kungsleden, the Royal Trail, a long-distance hiking route that extends 440 kilometers southward through the mountains of northern Sweden to the village of Hemavan. The Kungsleden is considered one of the finest long-distance hiking routes in Europe, passing through a succession of national parks and nature reserves and offering views of some of Sweden's most spectacular mountain scenery. The route is divided into five sections, each of which can be walked independently, with mountain huts maintained by the Swedish Tourist Association spaced at intervals of approximately twenty kilometers. The most popular section runs between Abisko and Kebnekaise, passing through the Lapporten, or Lap Gate, a distinctive U-shaped valley carved by glaciers that is one of the most photographed landscapes in Swedish Lapland.

Kebnekaise, at 2,099 meters, is the highest mountain in Sweden, located in a massif of glaciated peaks in northern Lapland. The summit can be reached by two routes: a technically straightforward southern route that involves crossing a glacier, and a more challenging western route requiring some rock climbing. The mountain is served by a mountain station maintained by the Swedish Tourist Association, from which guided ascents of the peak are organized during the summer season.

Gotland: Island of Raukar and Roses

Gotland, Sweden's largest island, lying approximately 90 kilometers off the east coast in the Baltic Sea, is a destination of extraordinary diversity. In summer it becomes one of Sweden's most fashionable holiday destinations, with its long sandy beaches, its warm water, its medieval architecture, and its festival calendar attracting large numbers of Swedish visitors. In spring and early summer, the island bursts into bloom with wildflowers, and in August it hosts one of Sweden's most unusual gastronomic traditions, the crayfish party season.

The island's capital, Visby, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the finest examples of a medieval trading city in all of Northern Europe. Visby's ring wall, built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, stands almost completely intact for a length of approximately 3.5 kilometers, its towers and gateways rising from the limestone rock of the island. Within the walls, the medieval street plan is largely preserved, with narrow lanes connecting churches, merchants' houses, and public squares. The city has twelve ruined medieval churches, their roofless interiors now serving as atmospheric venues for concerts and events, and a remarkable number of medieval buildings that have survived in a remarkable state of preservation.

Outside Visby, Gotland's limestone landscape offers some of its most distinctive scenery. The raukar, tall limestone sea stacks that rise from the sea or from former beaches, are found at several locations around the coast, most spectacularly at Langhammars on the northernmost peninsula of Faro, and at Digerhuvud. These formations were created by the dissolution of the limestone by the sea over thousands of years, leaving the harder pillars of rock standing while the softer surrounding material was eroded away. Faro island, connected to northern Gotland by a short ferry crossing, was the home of the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, who is buried in the churchyard of Faro church.

Gotland also has the best wild strawberries in Sweden, or so Gotlanders insist, and its lamb, fed on the herb-rich limestone grasslands, is considered among the finest in the country. The island has developed a lively food scene in recent years, with farm-to-table restaurants and local producers making the most of its distinctive agricultural products.

Oland: The Island of Windmills

Oland, the smaller of the two main Baltic islands, is connected to the Swedish mainland by a long bridge near Kalmar and offers a very different landscape from Gotland. The island is flat and narrow, about 137 kilometers long but only between 4 and 16 kilometers wide, and its dominant feature is the Alvar, a great central plateau of limestone grassland that covers roughly half the island and that is one of the largest areas of this rare habitat type in Europe. The Alvar supports an extraordinary variety of wildflowers in late spring and early summer, and it is of such international significance that it was included in the UNESCO World Heritage Site designation "Agricultural Landscape of Southern Oland."

Oland has more windmills than any other region of Sweden, with more than 400 still surviving in various states of preservation across the landscape. These windmills, dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were used to grind grain and pump water, and they give the island a distinctive visual character that distinguishes it from any other part of Sweden. The windmill landscape is particularly striking on the western coast, where a succession of towers stands against the sky above the flat shoreline.

Solliden Palace, the Swedish royal family's summer residence, is located at Borgholm on the western coast of Oland, and it and its gardens are open to visitors during the summer. The palace gardens, laid out in the early twentieth century, are considered among the finest in Sweden. King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia traditionally celebrate the king's birthday at Solliden in April, and the occasion draws considerable crowds.

High Coast: The UNESCO World Heritage Shoreline

The High Coast, Hoga Kusten, on the northeastern coast of Sweden in the county of Vasternorrland, is one of the most geographically extraordinary landscapes in the world, having been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in recognition of its exceptional illustration of the process of post-glacial land uplift. During the last ice age, the High Coast was covered by an ice sheet that pressed the land down by up to 800 meters. As the ice melted, beginning approximately 10,000 years ago, the land began to rebound upward, a process of isostatic adjustment that continues to this day at a rate of approximately eight millimeters per year. Over the past 10,000 years, the land of the High Coast has risen approximately 285 meters, the largest measured post-glacial land uplift anywhere in the world.

The result is a spectacular landscape of rocky islands, deep bays, narrow straits, and towering cliffs, all rising above the Baltic Sea in a configuration that is constantly being modified as the land continues its gradual ascent. The red wooden cottages that characterize Swedish coastal architecture are scattered across this dramatic landscape, and the area is popular with hikers, kayakers, and those who simply want to experience one of Sweden's most distinctive coastal environments. The Skuleskogen National Park, within the High Coast area, protects a section of primeval coastal forest that has never been felled, its old-growth trees providing an example of what the Swedish forest looked like before commercial forestry transformed most of the country.

Sweden's UNESCO World Heritage Sites: A Journey Through History

Sweden has fifteen UNESCO World Heritage Sites, reflecting the remarkable diversity of the country's natural and cultural heritage. Together they trace a journey through Swedish history from the Bronze Age to the twentieth century and across landscapes from the Arctic to the Baltic islands.

The first is Birka and Hovgarden, the Viking-age trading center on the islands of Bjorko and Adelsoe in Lake Malaren, inscribed in 1993. Birka, active from approximately 750 to 975 CE, was one of the most important trading centers in Northern Europe, and its archaeological remains provide an exceptional record of Viking-age society, trade networks, and material culture.

Drottningholm Palace, also inscribed in 1991, is the Swedish royal family's principal residence and one of the finest examples of seventeenth-century European court architecture outside of France. The palace, its gardens, the Chinese Pavilion, and above all the extraordinary Court Theatre, which survives in its original eighteenth-century state with original stage machinery and decor, constitute one of Sweden's most important historic monuments.

Engelsberg Ironworks, inscribed in 1993, is one of the best-preserved examples of the Swedish ironworking industry that was central to the country's economy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The ironworks at Engelsberg, in Vastmanland, operated from 1681 to 1919 and includes a complete complex of blast furnaces, forge buildings, managers' houses, and workers' cottages that provides an exceptional record of early industrial technology.

The Rock Carvings in Tanum, inscribed in 1994, represent the finest collection of Bronze Age petroglyphs in the world, with thousands of individual images carved into the flat rock surfaces of the Bohuslan region depicting ships, warriors, animals, and scenes from Bronze Age life.

Skogskyrkogarden, the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm, inscribed in 1994, is a masterpiece of early twentieth-century cemetery design created by the architects Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz. The cemetery, completed in 1940, integrates formal and informal landscape elements with a series of chapels and ceremonial spaces in a way that has influenced cemetery design worldwide.

The Hanseatic Town of Visby, inscribed in 1995, preserves the most complete medieval urban landscape in Scandinavia, with its circuit of walls, its ruined churches, and its medieval street plan intact.

The Church Village of Gammelstad in Lulea, inscribed in 1996, preserves an example of the church villages, kyrkstad, that developed in northern Sweden to provide temporary accommodation for parishioners who had to travel long distances to attend church services. More than 400 wooden cottages surround the medieval stone church, constituting one of the best-preserved examples of this uniquely Scandinavian settlement type.

The Laponian Area, inscribed in 1996, is one of the largest areas of pristine wilderness in Europe, covering approximately 9,400 square kilometers of mountains, forests, rivers, and bogs in Swedish Lapland. The area encompasses several national parks including Sarek, Padjelanta, Stora Sjofallets, and Muddus, and it is also a living cultural landscape of the Sami people, who continue to practice traditional reindeer herding within its boundaries.

The Naval Port of Karlskrona, inscribed in 1998, is one of the best-preserved examples of a late seventeenth-century European planned naval city, built by Charles XI as the main base of the Swedish navy and still serving as a major naval installation today.

The Agricultural Landscape of Southern Oland, inscribed in 2000, recognizes the exceptional cultural landscape created by more than 5,000 years of continuous agricultural use of the island's limestone Alvar plateau, resulting in a mosaic of farmland, grassland, and traditional settlement patterns that has considerable ecological as well as cultural significance.

The High Coast and Kvarken Archipelago, inscribed in 2000 and extended in 2006 to include the Finnish Kvarken Archipelago on the opposite shore of the Gulf of Bothnia, recognizes the exceptional illustration of post-glacial land uplift provided by this coastline.

The Decorated Farmhouses of Hälsingland, inscribed in 2012, preserves seven exceptional examples of the wooden farmhouses built by wealthy Halsingland farmers in the nineteenth century, decorated with elaborate painted interiors that represent the highest expression of Swedish folk art traditions.

The Falun Copper Mine and Mining Landscape, inscribed in 2001, recognizes the significance of the Falun copper mine, which operated from the tenth century to 1992 and was at its height in the seventeenth century the most productive copper mine in the world, providing the raw material for the copper roofs of European palaces and the revenue that funded Sweden's imperial ambitions.

The Grimeton Radio Station, inscribed in 2004, preserves the extraordinary early twentieth-century long-wave radio transmitter built at Grimeton in Halland between 1922 and 1924, which was for many years the most powerful radio transmitter in the world and which served as the primary communications link between Europe and North America.

Together these fifteen sites trace the extraordinary arc of Swedish history from prehistoric Bronze Age culture through Viking trade and medieval urbanity to industrial power and twentieth-century design innovation, offering visitors a framework for understanding the depth and diversity of Sweden's heritage.

Responsible Tourism and the Swedish Outdoor Ethic

Sweden's environmental consciousness is not merely a policy position but a deep cultural value, expressed in daily life through the choices that Swedes make about food, transportation, and consumption, and in public life through the policies that successive governments have adopted to protect the natural environment. The concept of Allemansratten, the Right of Public Access, enshrined in Swedish law, gives every person the right to walk, cycle, ride, ski, and camp anywhere in the Swedish countryside, regardless of who owns the land, as long as they do not disturb private gardens, cultivated land, or sensitive natural areas. The right comes with corresponding responsibilities: leave no trace, do not light open fires in dry conditions, close gates, do not disturb nesting birds, and take your litter with you.

The wild food culture of Sweden is an expression of this relationship with the natural world. Swedes forage extensively for wild mushrooms, wild berries including lingonberries, blueberries, and cloudberries, and wild herbs, with a knowledge of the natural world that is passed from generation to generation and that connects people to the forest in a direct and practical way. The lingonberry, which grows wild across the forests of Sweden and which is picked in enormous quantities each autumn, is perhaps the most emblematic of these wild foods, a small, bright red berry with a slightly tart flavor that appears on the Swedish table with a frequency that signals its centrality to the national food culture.

Visitors to Sweden can participate in this tradition through organized foraging excursions offered by tourism operators across the country, or simply by following a Swede's example and picking whatever grows freely along a forest path. The most important principle is to leave enough for the wildlife that depends on these foods and for other foragers who will come after you.

Ecotourism is well developed in Sweden, with numerous companies offering wildlife watching experiences including brown bear observation hides in the forests of Dalarna and Jamtland, eagle watching in the archipelagos, and moose safaris in Smaland and Norrland. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, Naturvardsverket, manages the national park system and produces excellent resources for visitors planning to explore Sweden's protected natural areas.