🇸🇪 Sweden · Stockholm and Svealand
The Stockholm archipelago is one of those places that sum up the soul of a country. A step from the capital, the city dissolves into the water in an endless rosary of islands — some 30,000, they say — that trail off towards the Baltic Sea. It is Sweden's great summer landscape: little red wooden cottages on the grey rocks, jetties where sailing boats are moored, blue and yellow flags fluttering, pine woods that run down to the shore and a silence broken only by a ferry engine and the lapping of the water.
For Swedes, the archipelago (skärgården) is not just another tourist destination: it is almost a way of life. Many families own or rent a summer cottage on one of the islands, and there they spend their holidays swimming in the Baltic — cold but clean water — fishing, picking blueberries and mushrooms in the woods, sailing and celebrating Midsommar. Visiting it means looking into that intimate, happy Sweden that lives facing the sea.
The best part is that you need neither a car nor any great complications: from central Stockholm ferries leave that in a short time take you to islands of every kind, from pretty Vaxholm or the nearby Fjäderholmarna to elegant Sandhamn or rugged Utö. This guide tells you how to move around the archipelago, which islands to choose depending on what you fancy, what it costs and how to make the most of this paradise of water and rock.
The Stockholm archipelago was formed after the last glaciation: the weight of the ice pushed the land down and, as it melted, the ground began to rise slowly (a phenomenon called post-glacial rebound that continues today, a few millimetres a year), bringing thousands of islands and skerries up out of the sea. Inhabited since ancient times by fishermen and farmers, the archipelago was for centuries a natural line of defence for Stockholm against attack from the sea, above all Danish and Russian; hence fortresses such as the one at Vaxholm, which guarded the approach to the capital. From the nineteenth century and, above all, the twentieth, with the arrival of steam and later of leisure time, the islands turned into the great summer destination for Stockholmers, who filled their shores with wooden cottages. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of Sweden around Lake Mälaren: pagan Old Uppsala and its thousand-year-old university, Viking Birka, the capital founded by Birger Jarl on the islands of Gamla Stan and the vast Stockholm archipelago with its thousands of islands.
Read the history of Stockholm and Svealand →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Stockholm archipelago is, above all, the work of geology and of ice. During the last glaciation, more than 10,000 years ago, this whole region was covered by an ice sheet several kilometres thick, whose enormous weight pushed the earth's crust down. When the ice melted, the land, freed of that load, began to rise slowly in a phenomenon known as post-glacial rebound or 'landhöjning'. And it is still doing so today: the coast around Stockholm still rises several millimetres a year.
That continuous rise explains the archipelago's unique landscape. What are today some 30,000 islands, islets and skerries were once seabed that gradually emerged. And the process has not stopped: skerries that used to be submerged break the surface, channels that used to be navigable grow shallower, and islands that were separate join up over the centuries. In Viking times, sea level was several metres higher than now, and many places today inland were then coast or harbour.
The result is an unrepeatable mosaic: granite rocks polished by the ice, rounded and smooth ('hällar'), pine and birch woods that colonise every island, and a gradient running from the large wooded islands near the city to the bare, wind-beaten islets on the outer edge facing the open sea. That landscape, half land and half water, is the setting for the whole human history of the archipelago.
The archipelago has been inhabited since very ancient times. Archaeological remains show a human presence going back thousands of years, and in the Viking and medieval periods the islands were an unavoidable passage for the trade and navigation entering and leaving Stockholm and the whole of Lake Mälaren. The sea routes eastwards — towards Finland, the Baltic countries and Rus — crossed the archipelago, and many place names and finds recall that traffic.
Life on the islands was for centuries hard and austere. Their inhabitants lived above all from fishing — especially Baltic herring (strömming), the basis of the diet — and from difficult farming and stock raising, on poor soils and with long winters. They were also seal hunters, gatherers and, many of them, sea pilots ('lotsar'): expert knowers of the intricate channels, shallows and skerries of the archipelago, who guided ships between the islands so they would not run aground. The figure of the pilot was essential for centuries, when there were no reliable charts or lighthouses, and it left an important mark on local culture.
Some islands developed particular activities. On Utö, for example, iron mines were worked from the Middle Ages, among the oldest in Sweden, which gave the island a singular industrial history, with its shafts, its miners' houses and its windmill. On others small chapels, pilots' taverns and customs posts were built. It was a humble world, closely tied to the sea and to the rhythms of nature, that had little to do with the elegant life of the nearby capital.
For centuries, the archipelago was much more than a place of fishermen: it was Stockholm's main line of defence. The Swedish capital could only be attacked from the sea through the maze of islands and channels, and whoever controlled those passages controlled the door to the kingdom. That is why, as early as the sixteenth century, King Gustav Vasa ordered the Vaxholm strait, the main approach to the city, to be fortified, sinking obstacles in the channel and raising defences.
So was born the Vaxholm fortress (Vaxholms kastell), which over the centuries was rebuilt and strengthened to close the passage to enemy fleets, above all Danish and, later, Russian. On several occasions the archipelago was a theatre of war: during the conflicts with Denmark and, above all, during the wars with Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Russian fleets went as far as sacking coastal villages. The present Vaxholm fortress, of the mid-nineteenth century, is an imposing stone castle that today houses a museum on the history of Swedish coastal defence.
That military vocation of the archipelago carried on into the twentieth century. During the Cold War, with Sweden neutral but heavily militarised and watchful of the neighbouring Soviet Union, numerous coastal artillery batteries, bunkers and secret positions cut into the rock were built on the islands, many of them hidden from the public until a few decades ago. Whole areas of the archipelago were militarised and off limits to foreigners. Only after the end of the Cold War were those defences dismantled and opened to tourism. Even today, some converted military installations can be visited as museums, testimony to centuries in which these islands were the capital's shield.
The archipelago's great transformation came in the nineteenth century with two novelties: the steamboat and leisure time. The appearance of regular steamers linking Stockholm with the islands — the seed of today's Waxholmsbolaget, founded in 1869 — suddenly brought the archipelago close to the city and put it within reach of the well-off classes. Stockholm's middle class and aristocracy then discovered the pleasure of summering by the sea, and began building elegant wooden villas with verandas and turrets ('sommarvillor') on islands such as Vaxholm, Sandhamn or Dalarö, which became fashionable.
Sandhamn in particular became the centre of Swedish nautical life: the Royal Swedish Yacht Club (KSSS) was established there and regattas were organised that drew high society, giving it the chic, seafaring air it keeps today. Around the villas, hotels, restaurants, bathing casinos and a sophisticated culture of summering flourished, reflected in Swedish painting and literature of the period; the writer August Strindberg, for example, set several of his works in the archipelago.
Over the twentieth century, with the spread of paid holidays and rising living standards, summering stopped being a matter for the rich and became democratic. Thousands of Swedish families built or bought their own summer cottage ('sommarstuga') on an island, painted Falun red with white frames, and with it the ritual of spending the holidays there: swimming in the Baltic, picking blueberries and mushrooms, fishing, rowing and celebrating Midsommar. That model — the wooden cottage by the water — became a central element of the Swedish imagination and national identity. Today the archipelago combines that vocation as a summer refuge with nature conservation and an increasingly international tourism, but it remains, above all, the place where Sweden goes to be happy in summer.