🇸🇪 Sweden · West Coast
Gothenburg is the friendliest, most down-to-earth city in Sweden, and its own people are proud of it. The country's second city and the great port of the west coast, it does not have Stockholm's palatial solemnity but a seafaring, industrial and surprisingly relaxed character, with a reputation for the best humour and the warmest people in Sweden. It is a city of canals, trams, fish markets and a food scene that has put it on the world map.
Founded in the seventeenth century by King Gustavus II Adolphus with the help of Dutch engineers, it keeps from that origin its canals and its grid layout. But what makes people fall for Gothenburg is its atmosphere: the Haga district, with its wooden houses and its cafés where you can try giant cinnamon buns; the great Avenyn boulevard; the picturesque church-shaped fish market (Feskekôrka); and a harbour full of history through which a good part of the country's wealth passed.
It is also the city of Volvo, of football and of the Liseberg amusement park, the biggest and best-loved in Scandinavia, which at Christmas turns into a dazzling Christmas market. And it is the gateway to an archipelago of car-free islands that starts a few minutes from the centre. This guide covers the essentials of Gothenburg with a practical and warm eye: what to see, how to get around by tram, what it costs and how to enjoy the most welcoming city in Sweden.
Gothenburg was officially founded in 1621 by King Gustavus II Adolphus, on a strategic site at the mouth of the Göta river, the only outlet to the North Sea left to Sweden between what were then Danish and Norwegian territories. Designed with the help of Dutch engineers (hence its canals and its grid layout), it was conceived as a stronghold and a trading port. In the eighteenth century it enjoyed its great boom with the Swedish East India Company, which traded with China (tea, porcelain, silk) and filled the city with wealth. With the industrialisation of the nineteenth century it became Sweden's great industrial and port centre, home of shipyards and, in the twentieth, of the carmaker Volvo. 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.
Unlike most European cities, which grew little by little over the centuries, Gothenburg was born of a plan. It was officially founded in 1621 by King Gustavus II Adolphus, the great warrior monarch of the Swedish empire, in a place chosen with strategic precision: the mouth of the Göta river, on the west coast. At that moment Sweden was almost boxed in by its enemies. The territories that are today southern Sweden (Scania) belonged to Denmark, and the coast further west to Norway (then joined to Denmark). The narrow stretch of coast around the Göta river was practically Sweden's only window onto the North Sea and onto trade with the west. Controlling it and fortifying it was vital.
That is why the king wanted to raise a great fortress-city and trading port there. To design and build it, the Swedish crown turned to Dutch engineers and settlers, at the time the world's greatest experts at building cities on marshy ground reclaimed from the water. The Dutch laid out Gothenburg on their model: a regular grid of streets crossed by canals that served for transport, trade and defence, ringed by walls and moats. Even today, the layout of the historic centre, with its canals and its grid plan, gives away that Dutch origin.
In its first decades, Gothenburg was a cosmopolitan and multicultural city for the time: besides Swedes, it was settled by Dutch, Germans, Scots and English, drawn by trade, many of whom took positions of power on the town council. A city with an international, seafaring vocation was thus born, looking out to the open sea, very different from the rest of Sweden.
The eighteenth century was Gothenburg's first great golden age, and it was tied to one name: the Swedish East India Company (Svenska Ostindiska Companiet), founded in 1731 and based in the city. Following the example of the powerful Dutch and English companies, this firm obtained the monopoly on Swedish trade with Asia, and very especially with China, through the great port of Canton (Guangzhou).
For almost a century, the company's ships left Gothenburg on long, risky voyages of a year and a half or two years, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, to bring back from China tea, porcelain, silk, spices and other luxury goods in high demand in Europe. Tea above all was the great business: a good part of what arrived in Gothenburg was re-exported (often smuggled) to Britain. Those expeditions, when they went well, brought enormous profits, and filled the city with wealth. The rich merchants built mansions, and the overseas trade gave Gothenburg a prosperous, worldly air.
That prosperity left its mark on the city's urban fabric and its institutions, and is still remembered today in museums and buildings. The company was dissolved at the start of the nineteenth century, when the tea business stopped being so lucrative, but it had established Gothenburg as Sweden's great commercial and port city, with a powerful merchant middle class and an outlook open to the world that would mark its character for good.
The nineteenth century transformed Gothenburg from a merchant city into a great industrial centre. The industrial revolution arrived in force on the Swedish west coast, and the city filled with factories: textiles, engineering, food and, above all, shipyards. Gothenburg became one of the great shipbuilding cities in the world: its shipyards on the banks of the Göta river — names such as Eriksberg, Götaverken or Lindholmen — came to be among the largest on the planet, launching enormous vessels and employing tens of thousands of workers.
That industrialisation drew masses of poor farmers from inland Sweden, who came to the city looking for work and crowded into new working-class districts. To house them, the distinctive 'landshövdingehus' appeared, buildings with a brick ground floor and wooden upper storeys, typical of Gothenburg. The city grew enormously, and with it a strong labour and trade union movement. It was also, for many, the way out: hundreds of thousands of Swedes emigrated to America through the port of Gothenburg between the middle of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, fleeing hunger and poverty, in one of the greatest exoduses in Swedish history.
In 1927 the city's most emblematic company was born: Volvo, the maker of cars and lorries that would become a symbol of Swedish industry and one of Gothenburg's main economic engines. The industrial city, with its shipyards, its factories and its working class, defined much of twentieth-century Gothenburg and of its hard-working, direct identity.
The second half of the twentieth century brought one of the hardest crises in Gothenburg's history. Shipbuilding, which had been the heart of its economy and its pride, went into decline from the seventies onwards in the face of competition from cheaper Asian shipyards. One after another, the city's great shipyards closed or shrank drastically during the 1970s and 1980s, leaving thousands of workers without a job and plunging the city into a deep economic depression. The great cranes by the river, once a symbol of vigour, stood idle as witnesses to an age that was ending.
Gothenburg had to reinvent itself, and to a large extent it managed it. The city bet on education, research, technology, services and tourism. The old shipyard areas on the north bank of the river, such as Lindholmen, were converted into modern technology parks and university campuses, where automotive, technology and science companies work today. The car industry (with Volvo at the head) remained important, and the port stayed the largest in Scandinavia, but more automated. The city also developed a powerful events, trade fair and conference industry, and its Liseberg park and its cultural offering made it a first-rank tourist destination.
Today Gothenburg is a prosperous, green city committed to sustainability, proud of its transformation. It keeps its seafaring and industrial character, its humour and its reputation as the most welcoming city in Sweden, but it looks to the future with ambitious urban projects on both banks of the river. The old city of the shipyards and of the China trade has reinvented itself without losing its hard-working soul, open to the world.