🇸🇪 Sweden · West Coast
The Gothenburg archipelago is one of the city's great secrets: a world of car-free islands, wooden cottages and open sea that starts barely half an hour from the centre and that you reach on a normal transport ticket. While Stockholm has its famous Baltic archipelago, Gothenburg has its own on the west coast, more intimate and accessible, with the salty flavour of the North Sea and the polished granite of the province of Bohuslän.
The heart of the experience is the southern archipelago (Södra skärgård): islands such as Styrsö, Brännö, Donsö, Vrångö or Asperö, all car-free, where people move on foot, by bike or in electric buggies. They are quiet islands of fishermen and summer people, with pretty harbours, paths among rocks and heath, coves for swimming and restaurants where you can try the prawns and shellfish for which the west coast is famous across Sweden.
The best part is how remarkably accessible it is: a tram to Saltholmen and a ferry, all on the same city transport ticket, and you are already in another world. It is the perfect plan for a sunny day, and one of the best value-for-money experiences of any European destination. This guide tells you how to get to the archipelago and move around it, which islands to choose, what it costs and how to make the most of this maritime paradise a step from Sweden's second city.
The islands of the Gothenburg archipelago, of granite polished by the ancient glaciers, were inhabited for millennia by peoples who lived from fishing and the sea. For centuries they were communities of fishermen and pilots, tied to the herring fishery — which went through great booms and crises on the west coast — and, in times of scarcity, to smuggling and seafaring. With their position facing the great port of Gothenburg, some islands also had a role in defence and in piloting ships. From the nineteenth century and above all the twentieth, with the arrival of steam and of leisure time, they became the summer destination of Gothenburgers, who filled their shores with wooden cottages, without ever losing their fishing-village atmosphere. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Sweden's front on the North Sea: Gothenburg, the city of canals founded by Dutchmen and gateway of the East India Company; the granite and herring coast of Bohuslän; the fortress and the sailing summers of Marstrand; and the car-free archipelago facing the city.
Read the history of West Coast →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Gothenburg archipelago is, above all, a landscape of granite. Its islands are outcrops of very ancient rock, polished and rounded by the glaciers of successive ice ages, which left those smooth surfaces ('hällar') so characteristic of the Swedish west coast and of the neighbouring province of Bohuslän. As all along the Scandinavian shore, the land has kept rising slowly ever since the weight of the ice disappeared, in the phenomenon of post-glacial rebound, so the profile of the islands has changed over the millennia.
These coasts were inhabited from very early on. The Bohuslän region, just to the north, is famous for its thousands of Bronze Age rock carvings (the Tanum petroglyphs are a World Heritage Site), which show boats, hunters and ritual scenes, proof that more than 3,000 years ago there were already communities living from the sea on this coast. On the islands of the Gothenburg archipelago, remains of ancient settlements, graves and traces of those early populations have also been found.
For centuries, life on the islands revolved around the sea: fishing, seal hunting, gathering and a minimal agriculture on the scarce soils. They were small, isolated and self-sufficient communities, hardened by the wind and the open sea of the Kattegat. That deep and ancient bond with the sea is the basis of the archipelago's whole later history, and it can still be sensed in the seafaring character of its people.
The economic history of the archipelago is marked by one fish: herring (sill, or strömming in the Baltic). Sweden's west coast went through several great 'herring periods' ('sillperioder') over the centuries, times when enormous shoals of herring came close to the coast and could be caught in fabulous quantities. One of the most famous took place at the end of the eighteenth century, roughly between 1747 and 1809, when the herring fishery set off a genuine economic fever across the whole Gothenburg and Bohuslän region.
During those years, the islands and the coast filled with facilities for processing the fish: salting houses and, above all, the 'trankokerier', factories where herring was boiled to extract oil (tran), in high demand for lighting (oil lamps) before the age of petroleum. It was a time of great prosperity, but also of heavy environmental impact, with the waters polluted by the waste. When, at the start of the nineteenth century, the herring shoals disappeared as mysteriously as they had come, many communities were ruined.
In the hard times between fishing booms, the islanders turned to other activities to survive, among them smuggling, taking advantage of the maze of islands and channels and the closeness of the sea borders. Fishing remained, in any case, the backbone of life in the archipelago well into the twentieth century, and on islands such as Donsö or those of the northern archipelago (Hönö, Öckerö) it left a strong seafaring and shipping tradition that endures: Donsö is today, despite its small size, an important centre of Swedish shipowners.
As happened with the Stockholm archipelago, the great transformation came with the steamboat and leisure time. Over the nineteenth century, regular steamer lines began to connect the growing industrial Gothenburg with the nearby islands, putting them within reach of the city's people. Well-off Gothenburgers then discovered the pleasure of escaping the smoke and bustle of the industrial city and spending the summer by the sea, on the islands of the southern archipelago, the closest and most accessible.
Islands such as Brännö, Styrsö or Asperö became fashionable as summer destinations. Villas and wooden cottages were built for summer stays, along with guesthouses, bathing houses and establishments where you could take the sea air, considered healthy. A whole culture of island summering grew up, with its rituals: swimming in the sea, walks, and the famous summer parties and dances on the jetties, such as the famous 'brygghdans' at the Husvik landing stage on Brännö, which became a nostalgic symbol of the Swedish summer.
Over the twentieth century, with the spread of holidays, that summering became democratic, and the islands combined their traditional fishing life with their new role as a summer refuge. Many Gothenburg families have had their summer cottage in the archipelago ever since, and the islands fill with life in the warm months only to return to calm in winter. That double identity — a real fishing village and a summer paradise — still defines the southern archipelago today.
The twenty-first-century Gothenburg archipelago has managed to keep its character while becoming one of the city's great attractions. A key decision was to keep the islands of the southern archipelago free of cars: on Styrsö, Brännö, Donsö, Vrångö, Asperö and Köpstadsö no private cars run, and people move on foot, by bicycle or in small electric vehicles. That has preserved a calm, safe and quiet atmosphere, much valued both by permanent residents and by visitors.
Another key has been the integration of the archipelago into Gothenburg's public transport system. The ferries connecting the southern islands, run by Styrsöbolaget, are part of the Västtrafik network, so you can get there from the city centre — by tram to Saltholmen and then by ferry — on a single city transport ticket. That simplicity and low cost make the archipelago an exceptionally accessible destination: you need no car, no bookings and no great expense to spend a day hopping from island to island.
Today the archipelago combines the everyday life of its communities — with residents who live there all year, some still working in fishing and shipping — with a sustainable tourism that seeks precisely that authenticity: the wooden cottages, the harbours, the west-coast shellfish, swimming off the granite rocks and the paths through the nature reserves. In an increasingly hurried world, these car-free islands, half an hour from Sweden's second city, offer a haven of calm and nature that sums up the best of the Swedish summer.