🇸🇪 Sweden · Dalarna and Swedish Lapland
If there is a mental image of 'the Sweden of always' — little wooden houses painted deep red, coloured wooden horses, green meadows beside an immense lake, girls in flower crowns dancing around a leafy pole in high summer — that image comes, almost certainly, from Dalarna. This province in the centre of the country is the folk and traditional heart of Sweden, the place where customs, dress, crafts and festivals are kept most alive, and where much of the national iconography was born.
The centre of it all is Lake Siljan, an enormous body of water ringed by villages with centuries of history: Mora, where the famous Dalarna horses (dalahäst) are made by hand and where the legendary Vasaloppet ski race ends; Rättvik, with its very long wooden jetty reaching out into the lake; Leksand, famous for its midsommar celebration; and Tällberg, a village of red houses perched above the water. The Siljan also hides a geological secret: it is the scar of a meteorite that struck 377 million years ago, one of the largest impact craters in Europe.
This guide covers Dalarna with a practical and warm eye: what to see around the Siljan, where to buy and watch the wooden horses being made, how to experience the most authentic midsommar in Sweden, how to get around (key: a car is worth having, because the villages are scattered), when to go depending on the season and what everything costs. A perfect destination for immersing yourself in rural, traditional and naturally beautiful Sweden, far from the big cities.
Dalarna has a unique place in the history and identity of Sweden. Much of the country was forged in its forests and mines: the Falun copper mine, worked since the Middle Ages, came to produce in the seventeenth century a large part of the world's copper and financed the wars and the might of the Swedish empire; from its red earth comes the famous 'falurött' pigment that paints houses across the country. Dalarna was also the cradle of Swedish freedom: here, in the 1520s, the farmers (the 'Dalecarlians') rose up and backed Gustav Vasa in the struggle that drove out the Danes and founded the modern Swedish state; that rising is remembered every year in the Vasaloppet ski race, which recalls Gustav Vasa's flight. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Sweden modernised, Dalarna became a symbol of national roots and traditions, celebrated by artists such as Anders Zorn and Carl Larsson, who fixed the romantic image of the region for good. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓From the free farmers of Dalarna — cradle of Gustav Vasa, of Falun copper and of the painted horse that is a symbol of Sweden — to the Arctic Lapland of the Sami people, the iron of Kiruna and the auroras of Abisko: two hearts of the country, one folk, one polar.
Read the history of Dalarna and Swedish Lapland →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Dalarna is written, to a large extent, in copper. At Falun, in the east of the region, there is a copper mine — the Falu gruva, the 'Great Copper Mountain' — that was worked for more than a thousand years and became the economic heart of Sweden. There are signs of mining activity here as early as the ninth or tenth century, and from the Middle Ages the mine kept growing until it became the most important enterprise in the kingdom. It has been said to be the longest-lived industrial operation in history: it ran, with ups and downs, until 1992.
Its peak came in the seventeenth century, the era when Sweden was a European great power. At that moment, the Falun mine came to produce around two thirds of all the world's copper. The metal was exported across half of Europe and the profits directly financed the Swedish state: the army, the navy, the wars that made Sweden the dominant power in the Baltic. It is no exaggeration to say that the seventeenth-century Swedish empire rested, literally, on Dalarna copper. Queen Christina and the warrior kings of the age depended on this mine.
Work in the mine was extremely hard and dangerous. Thousands of miners dug ever deeper galleries in extreme conditions, with collapses, gases and frequent accidents. The most famous of those collapses happened, significantly, on a midsommar day in 1687, when a large part of the mine caved in and formed the giant crater (Stora Stöten) that still impresses visitors today; luckily, being a holiday, there was almost nobody working.
Out of the Falun mine also came something that today defines Sweden visually: 'falurött', Falun red. It is a pigment made from the waste of copper extraction, which from the seventeenth century was used to paint wooden houses. That deep red, cheap and protective, spread across the whole country and became the colour of the Swedish house par excellence: the little red houses with white frames that are a symbol of Sweden owe their colour to Dalarna copper. In 2001, Unesco declared the Falun mining region a World Heritage Site.
Dalarna holds an almost mythical place in the Swedish national story as the cradle of the country's freedom and independence. The founding episode happened at the start of the 1520s, in the context of the Kalmar Union, which kept Sweden under the Danish crown. In 1520, the Danish king Christian II carried out the so-called 'Stockholm Bloodbath', the execution of dozens of Swedish nobles and notables, among them the father of a young nobleman called Gustav Eriksson, who would go down in history as Gustav Vasa.
Gustav Vasa fled and reached Dalarna looking for support to rise against the Danes. According to the traditional account — a mix of history and legend — he went round the region's villages trying to persuade the farmers, the Dalecarlians, to rebel. At first they refused, and Gustav, discouraged, set off in flight towards Norway with the Danish soldiers at his heels. But the farmers of Mora, regretting it once they learned of Christian II's atrocities, sent their two best skiers after him to bring him back. They caught up with him near Sälen, and Gustav returned to lead the rebellion.
That rebellion, backed by the tenacious farmers of Dalarna, succeeded: in 1523 Sweden broke away from the Kalmar Union and Gustav Vasa was proclaimed king, founding the modern Swedish state and the Vasa dynasty. That is why Dalarna is remembered as the region where independent Sweden was born, and the Dalecarlians as the people who made that freedom possible.
That epic is commemorated every year in the Vasaloppet, the most famous cross-country ski race in the world, which since 1922 has covered the 90 km between Sälen and Mora recalling the skiers' pursuit of Gustav Vasa. The race's motto — 'I fäders spår för framtids segrar' ('In the tracks of our fathers for the victories of the future') — sums up that connection between sport, history and national identity. Every March, thousands of skiers symbolically relive that founding moment.
Beyond mining and politics, what makes Dalarna a unique place is its extremely strong rural popular culture, which stayed alive far more than in other parts of Sweden. Isolated by its forests and mountains, with deeply rooted rural communities, the region kept for centuries traditions, crafts, music, dances, dialects and dress that were lost elsewhere with modernisation.
Every village or parish in Dalarna developed its own traditional dress (folkdräkt or sockendräkt), with distinctive colours, embroidery and details that identified where each person came from. Even today, at the big celebrations — above all midsommar — many people wear their village's dress, and an expert eye can recognise the origin of each one. It is one of the few regions in Europe where folk dress still has a living use and not merely a folkloric, display one.
Traditional music, with the fiddle (fiol) as king of the instruments, is another pillar of Dalarna culture. The 'spelmän' (folk musicians) keep a repertoire of polskas and dance tunes that accompany the celebrations, and the region is a centre of Swedish folk music. Ring dances, woodwork and textile crafts, and traditions tied to the farming calendar round out this heritage.
The celebration that best condenses all of this is midsommar, the summer solstice, which in Dalarna is celebrated with exceptional intensity and authenticity. The leafy maypole (majstång), the dancing, the dress, the traditional food (herring, new potatoes, strawberries) and the endless light of the longest night of the year make the Dalecarlian midsommar — that of Leksand and other villages — one of the most genuine cultural spectacles in Sweden. These traditions, far from being a reconstruction for tourists, are part of the living fabric of the community, passed on from generation to generation.
At the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, as Sweden was industrialising and modernising at full speed, a powerful romantic movement arose in the country that looked to the countryside, to traditions and to popular roots for the nation's authentic soul. And in that movement, Dalarna became the ideal setting, the very symbol of 'the true Sweden'. Two painters were decisive in fixing that image: Anders Zorn and Carl Larsson.
Anders Zorn (1860-1920), born near Mora, was one of the most celebrated Swedish artists of all time. He triumphed across Europe and in the United States as a virtuoso portraitist — he painted three American presidents and the high society of his day — and as a master of watercolour and oil. But he returned again and again to Dalarna, to paint its farmers, its festivals, its women, its landscapes and its rural life with an unforgettable force and light. Zorn loved his native land, collected and preserved traditional buildings and objects, and helped to give the region's popular culture its value again. His house and his collection in Mora are today the Zornmuseet.
Carl Larsson (1853-1919), for his part, portrayed in his famous watercolours idyllic family life at his house at Sundborn, near Falun. His luminous images of interiors, gardens, children and domestic celebrations — published in books that spread around the world — created an ideal of the Swedish home, warm and beautiful, that hugely influenced the country's taste, decoration and visual identity. Larsson's aesthetic is at the origin of the image the world has of 'Swedish style'.
Thanks to artists such as Zorn and Larsson, and to writers and folklorists of the same period, Dalarna was consecrated as the romantic heart of Sweden, the region that embodied traditions, rural beauty and national roots. That 'picture-postcard Sweden' — red cottages, wooden horses, midsommar, meadows and lakes — that we associate with the country today was born in good part from this way of looking at Dalarna. The Dalarna horse (dalahäst), turned into a national emblem after the 1939 New York World's Fair, is the perfect symbol of that process.
Contemporary Dalarna lives a balance between modernity and the conservation of its rich inheritance. It is a region of forests, lakes and villages, with Falun and Borlänge as urban centres and with the Lake Siljan district — Mora, Rättvik, Leksand, Tällberg — as its tourist and cultural heart. The economy combines industry, forestry, tourism and crafts, and the region remains a magnet for those looking for traditional, natural Sweden.
What is remarkable about Dalarna is that its traditions are not museum pieces but part of present-day life. Midsommar is celebrated every year with dress, maypoles and dances that bring communities together; the Dalarna horses are still carved and hand-painted at Nusnäs; folk fiddle music has festivals and active practitioners; and the calendar's festivals keep their force. That continuity, in a country as modern and secular as Sweden, makes Dalarna a special place.
Tourism makes the most of all that heritage, but also of the nature. In summer, Lake Siljan and its surroundings draw Swedish and international visitors for hiking, cycling, swimming and outdoor life. In winter, the region is a destination for skiing (with Sälen at the head) and snow sports, and the Vasaloppet brings together tens of thousands of skiers from all over the world every March. The museums — the Zornmuseet, the Falun mine, Carl Larsson's house — round out the cultural offering.
Dalarna remains, for Swedes, much more than a region: it is a symbol, the place where the roots are kept, the image of what Sweden was and of what it likes to think it is. Visiting it means looking into that deep Sweden of red cottages, wooden horses and summer light, made of mining history, peasant rebellions, art and traditions that, against all the odds, are still alive.