Like all of Scandinavia, Swedish territory lay under a thick sheet of ice during the last glaciation. As the ice pulled back, some 11,000 to 12,000 years ago, the first hunter-gatherers advanced from the south following the reindeer and the game. The weight of the ice had pushed the land down, and it has been rising slowly ever since — isostasy, a phenomenon that even today is bringing new coastline up out of the Gulf of Bothnia. On that young ground came the Stone Age, the Bronze Age — with its rock carvings, such as those at Tanum in Bohuslän, today a World Heritage Site — and the Iron Age, when the farming societies that would give rise to the Swedes took shape.
Towards the end of the Iron Age the country was organised around two great centres: the Svear, around Lake Mälaren and the region of Svealand, and the Götar, further south, in Götaland. From the name of the Svear — the "kingdom of the Swedes", Svea rike, which gives today's Sverige — the name of the country would eventually come. Tradition places the heart of pagan power at Gamla Uppsala, Old Uppsala, where three enormous royal mounds from the sixth century still dominate the plain and where, according to the German chronicler Adam of Bremen at the end of the eleventh century, there stood a famous temple dedicated to Odin, Thor and Freyr, in which every nine years great sacrifices of men and animals were held.
That account by Adam of Bremen should be read with caution: he was a Christian cleric writing about a pagan cult he wanted to fight, and archaeology has not confirmed a monumental temple like the one he describes, though it has confirmed a large cult enclosure. What is beyond doubt is the sacred and political centrality of Gamla Uppsala in pre-Christian Sweden. Kings were crowned and buried there, and the thing, the assembly of free men, was held there. Out of that world of warrior farmers, gods of Valhalla and Baltic seafarers would come the Swedish Vikings.
While the Norwegian and Danish Vikings looked west — to the British Isles, Iceland and America — the Swedish Vikings looked above all to the east. From the shores of Mälaren and the Baltic, these seafarers and traders, called Varangians by the Greeks and Byzantines, went up the great rivers of today's Russia and Ukraine — the Volga, the Dnieper — in search of silver, silk, slaves and furs. They founded or dominated trading centres, and the Primary Chronicle speaks of them when it recounts that around the year 862 the chieftain Rurik and his men, the Rus, were called on to rule among the Slavs. From that name, Rus, would come, according to the most widely accepted theory, the name of Russia, although the matter is still the subject of an old and heated historiographical debate, above all in Russia itself.
The Varangians reached Constantinople — which they called Miklagard, the "great city" — and served the Byzantine emperors in the famous Varangian Guard, the emperor's Scandinavian elite corps. Their trade routes ran as far as the caliphate of Baghdad, and the tens of thousands of Arab silver coins found on Swedish soil — many on the island of Gotland — prove the scale of that traffic. All across Sweden, too, thousands of runestones remain, inscriptions carved in memory of those who set out: many recall men who died "in the east", in Gardarike (Russia), in Serkland (the Muslim lands) or in the service of Byzantium.
The great emporium of the age was Birka, on the island of Björkö in Lake Mälaren: the first city proper in Sweden, an international trading centre active between the eighth and tenth centuries, where in the year 829 the monk Ansgar, the "apostle of the North", preached in the first attempt to Christianise the Swedes. Birka, today a World Heritage Site together with neighbouring Hovgården, was abandoned around the year 970, and its role was inherited by Sigtuna. That world open to the Baltic and to the rivers of the east marked Sweden's orientation for good.
The unification of Sweden was a slow and poorly documented process. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the kings gradually imposed their authority over Svear and Götar, but the kingdom remained for a long time an elective and weak monarchy, fought over by rival lineages — the houses of Sverker and Erik alternated on the throne in bloody wars. Christianisation accompanied and underpinned that process: although Ansgar had already preached in the ninth century, paganism resisted strongly, above all around Uppsala, and it was not until the late eleventh and the twelfth century that Christianity finally took hold. King Erik IX, killed in 1160 and later venerated as Saint Erik, patron of Sweden, became tied to that Christianisation and to the first crusades against the pagans of Finland, which Sweden would incorporate into its crown over the centuries.
In the thirteenth century the decisive figure was Birger Jarl, a powerful regent who effectively ruled the kingdom and to whom tradition attributes the founding of Stockholm around 1252, on a strategic islet that closed the passage between the Baltic and Lake Mälaren. The location — easy to defend and perfect for controlling trade — made the new city prosper quickly, and around what is now Gamla Stan, the old town on the island, it became the kingdom's main port and, in time, its capital. Birger Jarl also pushed through laws protecting the peace of the home, the church, the thing and of women, a step towards an incipient rule of law.
Through the late Middle Ages, Sweden gave itself firmer institutions: a common law for the whole kingdom (the Magnus Erikssons landslag, of the fourteenth century), an organised Church with its archbishopric at Uppsala and an economy in which iron and, above all, the copper of the Falun mine in Dalarna weighed heavily. Swedish society kept, more than others in Europe, a broad layer of free landowning farmers, who had a voice in the assemblies and who, when it came to it, knew how to take up arms. That tradition of a free and combative peasantry would leave its mark on all the country's later history.
In 1397, at Kalmar Castle, the energetic Queen Margaret of Denmark put together the Kalmar Union, which brought the three Scandinavian kingdoms — Denmark, Sweden and Norway — under a single monarch. On paper it was the greatest power in northern Europe; in practice it was a century of permanent tension. A good part of the Swedish nobility and peasantry distrusted Danish dominance, and rose again and again against the kings of the union. The most famous rebellion was that of Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, a noble mine owner from Dalarna who in the 1430s led a popular uprising against King Eric of Pomerania and summoned what is usually considered the first Riksdag, Sweden's first representative assembly. The union barely survived, held together by Swedish regents of the Sture family who effectively governed around the Danish king.
The end came violently. In 1520 the Danish king Christian II invaded Sweden, defeated and killed the regent Sten Sture the Younger and had himself crowned in Stockholm. A few days later, between 8 and 9 November 1520, he ordered the execution in the city's main square, the Stortorget, of some eighty or ninety people — bishops, nobles and burghers who supported the Stures — in what went down in history as the Stockholm Bloodbath (Stockholms blodbad). Far from securing Danish power, the massacre set off a general insurrection.
Among those who had lost a father in the massacre was a young nobleman, Gustav Eriksson Vasa. Fleeing towards Dalarna, he managed to raise the peasantry — the episode of his flight on skis lies at the origin of today's Vasaloppet race — and led a war of liberation that drove the Danes out. On 6 June 1523 the Riksdag meeting at Strängnäs elected him king of Sweden under the name Gustav I. That day — today Sweden's national holiday — marks both the end of the Kalmar Union and the birth of the modern, independent Swedish state.
The reign of Gustav Vasa (1523-1560) refounded Sweden. His first great decision was to break with Rome. At the Riksdag of Västerås in 1527, riding the impulse of the Protestant Reformation then sweeping Europe, the king secured the confiscation of the property of the Catholic Church — which held enormous estates — and placed the Church under the control of the crown. Sweden thus became Lutheran, in a process directed from above, for reasons both religious and, above all, financial and political: church property filled the royal coffers and broke the power of a rival. The Bible was translated into Swedish, and that translation helped fix the written national language.
Gustav Vasa was a hard, shrewd and often brutal ruler, who crushed peasant rebellions without mercy — including those of his old allies in Dalarna, who felt betrayed by the new taxes and the closing down of the old religious customs. He centralised the administration, put the treasury in order, encouraged iron and copper mining and built a standing army and fleet. In 1544, at that same Riksdag of Västerås, he had it approved that the crown would cease to be elective and would pass by inheritance within his family, the house of Vasa. It was a quiet revolution: the kingdom was no longer at the mercy of noble elections and became a stable dynastic monarchy.
Out of that refounding came a solid state, with a national Church at the service of the crown, a bureaucracy in the making and healthy finances: the foundations on which his sons and grandsons would raise an empire in the following century. Gustav Vasa was fixed in Swedish memory as the father of the country, the man who gave it back its independence and gave it a state. With him, Sweden entered the modern age in full.
For a little over a century, Sweden was one of the great military powers of Europe. The Stormaktstiden — the "Age of Greatness" — was led first by Gustavus II Adolphus (king from 1611 to 1632), one of the greatest strategists of his time, who modernised the army with mobile artillery and new tactics. In 1630 he intervened in the Thirty Years' War on the Protestant side, swept through northern Germany and saved the Lutheran cause, but fell at the battle of Lützen in 1632. His chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, one of the great statesmen of the century, held the policy together during the minority of Queen Christina and organised a model administration.
Sweden came out of the Thirty Years' War, with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, as the dominant power in the Baltic, holding possessions in northern Germany. To that it added, in the following decades, the conquest of the southern Danish provinces — Scania, Halland, Blekinge, Bohuslän — wrested from Denmark in the Peace of Roskilde of 1658, the most humiliating Copenhagen would ever sign. The Baltic had become a "Swedish lake": the empire took in present-day Finland, Estonia, Latvia, strips of Germany and Poland, and the southern lands of the peninsula. It was also the age of Queen Christina, cultivated and eccentric, who astonished Europe by abdicating in 1654, converting to Catholicism and going off to Rome.
That empire, however, was fragile: it rested on a poor and thinly populated country — barely a million and a half inhabitants in Sweden proper — that could only sustain its armies by squeezing its peasants and its provinces. The revenue from Falun copper and from iron, and a system of recruitment and of allotting soldiers to farms (the indelningsverk), kept the war machine going. But one unlucky great war would be enough to bring the whole edifice down, and that war would arrive with the new century.
In 1697, at the age of fifteen, Charles XII (Karl XII) came to the throne, a warrior king, austere and stubborn, who would spend almost his whole reign on horseback, on campaign. Barely crowned, in 1700, a coalition of Denmark, Saxony-Poland and the Russia of Peter the Great attacked the Swedish empire in what would become the Great Northern War. The young king answered with a run of dazzling victories: he knocked Denmark out of the war, crushed a far larger Russian army at the battle of Narva in 1700, and defeated and dethroned the king of Poland. For years he seemed invincible.
The turning point was his decision to invade Russia. Pushing into an immense territory, the Swedish army was left at the mercy of the Russian scorched-earth tactic and of an atrocious winter. On 28 June (8 July) 1709, at the battle of Poltava, in today's Ukraine, Peter the Great destroyed the exhausted army of Charles XII. It was one of the decisive battles of European history: it marked the end of Sweden as a great power and the rise of Russia. The king barely escaped and spent years in exile in the Ottoman Empire before returning. He died in 1718, shot in the head, during the siege of a Norwegian fortress, in circumstances that are still argued over: some suspect he was killed by his own men, sick of an endless war.
With the Peace of Nystad in 1721, Sweden ceded to Russia its Baltic provinces — Estonia, Livonia, Ingria — and much of southeastern Finland. The Baltic empire had vanished. The country was left exhausted, impoverished and bled dry by decades of war. The death of Charles XII and total defeat brought the Age of Greatness to an end and opened a completely different stage: the nobility and the parliament, sick of the royal absolutism that had led to disaster, took power away from the crown.
The disaster of Charles XII opened the so-called Frihetstiden, the "Age of Liberty" (1718-1772), a long period in which power passed from the king to the Riksdag and to the parties — the "Hats" and the "Caps" — in a pioneering parliamentary regime, though also a corrupt one and subject to the intrigues of foreign powers. It was a time of remarkable scientific and cultural flowering: the botanist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus), who devised at Uppsala the system of classifying living things that we still use; the astronomer Anders Celsius, creator of the temperature scale; and an intense intellectual life. In 1766, Sweden passed one of the first freedom-of-the-press laws in the world.
The Age of Liberty ended in 1772, when King Gustav III staged a coup and restored the power of the crown. Cultivated, enlightened and a lover of theatre and the arts — he founded the Swedish Academy, which today awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Royal Opera — Gustav III was also an increasingly authoritarian monarch, which earned him the hatred of part of the nobility. In 1792 he was shot dead during a masked ball at the Stockholm Opera, an episode that would inspire operas and dramas across Europe.
The final blow to the old order came in 1808-1809. In the context of the Napoleonic wars, Russia — then allied with France — invaded Finland, which had been an integral part of the Swedish kingdom since the Middle Ages. Sweden was defeated and, by the Treaty of Fredrikshamn in 1809, had to cede all of Finland to the tsar, who turned it into an autonomous Grand Duchy. The loss was traumatic: Sweden lost at a stroke a third of its territory and a quarter of its population, and was reduced more or less to its present borders. The shock brought on an internal revolution: King Gustav IV Adolf, blamed for the disaster, was deposed in 1809, and that same year a new constitution was passed sharing power between the crown and the Riksdag, one that, with reforms, would remain in force until 1974.
After the fall of Gustav IV Adolf, Sweden needed an heir, and its choice turned out to be a most unlikely one: in 1810 the Riksdag offered the throne to one of Napoleon's marshals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, a Gascon lawyer turned general of the French Revolution. Adopted by the elderly Swedish king, Bernadotte took the name Charles John (Karl Johan) and soon became the country's strongman. Against all expectation, he did not tie Sweden to Napoleon's cart: on the contrary, he allied himself with the powers fighting France. As compensation for the loss of Finland, he obtained that Norway — until then joined to Denmark — should pass to Sweden. After a brief campaign in 1814, Norway was bound to the Swedish crown in a personal union that would last until 1905.
The 1814 campaign against Norway was the last war Sweden has fought. Since then — more than two centuries — the country has not gone to war again, a record that is almost unique in Europe. Bernadotte, crowned as Charles XIV John in 1818, founded the dynasty that still reigns in Sweden: the current king, Carl XVI Gustaf, is his direct descendant. The monarchy became progressively constitutional and symbolic.
The Swedish nineteenth century was, after centuries of war, a century of peace, of reform and of slow transformation. Old privileges were abolished, the Riksdag was reformed — in 1866 the old four-estate diet was replaced by a bicameral parliament — railways and canals were built (such as the Göta, which crosses the country from sea to sea) and the foundations of public education were laid. But Sweden was still, at bottom, a poor agrarian country, of long winters and difficult land, from which hundreds of thousands of people would very soon start to flee in search of a better life on the other side of the Atlantic.
Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, Sweden was transformed from the roots up. The country was poor: bad harvests, such as the famines of the late 1860s, pushed whole families to emigrate. Between 1850 and 1930, around 1.3 million Swedes — out of a population of about five million — left the country, the vast majority bound for the United States, where they settled above all in the Midwest, in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois. That epic, portrayed by the writer Vilhelm Moberg in his novel cycle The Emigrants, left a deep mark on the national memory; the House of Emigrants in Växjö keeps its memory alive.
At the same time, and partly in response to that misery, industrialisation got going. Sweden had three decisive resources: high-quality iron from the north, timber from its immense forests and the energy of its rivers. On those a modern industry was built, fed by a remarkable tradition of inventors and engineers: Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite and amassed a fortune that he left to the prizes bearing his name; Lars Magnus Ericsson in telephony; the founders of firms such as ASEA, SKF, or later Volvo (1927) and Electrolux. The construction of the iron ore railway to the north made it possible to work the iron deposits of Lapland and export them through the Norwegian port of Narvik.
Industrialisation also brought a working class and a powerful trade union and political movement. In 1889 the Social Democratic Party (SAP) was founded and in 1898 the LO trade union confederation. The struggles for the vote and for better conditions were hard — the great general strike of 1909, the killing of workers at Ådalen in 1931, when the army fired on a demonstration and killed five people — but they gradually opened the way to reform. Universal male and female suffrage was achieved in 1918-1921. In 1932 the Social Democratic Party came to power, and would hold it, almost without interruption, for more than forty years: modern Sweden was beginning.
Sweden stayed neutral in both world wars, although its neutrality was criticised and debated. In the First World War it managed to stay out. In the Second, surrounded by a Norway and a Denmark occupied by Nazi Germany and by a Finland at war with the USSR, neutrality was more ambiguous and uncomfortable: Sweden went on selling Germany the iron its war industry needed and allowed, in 1940-1943, the transit of German troops across its territory towards Norway and Finland, concessions that are judged severely today. At the same time, it took in tens of thousands of refugees — among them almost all the Danish Jews, saved in 1943 — and Swedish diplomats such as Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands of Hungarian Jews in Budapest from deportation. Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviets in 1945 and disappeared into the Gulag, in one of the great mysteries of the postwar years.
The great story of the Swedish twentieth century, however, is an internal one: the building of the folkhemmet, the "people's home". The expression, popularised in 1928 by the social democratic leader Per Albin Hansson, summed up the idea of a society-as-home in which nobody would be left unprotected. On the basis of a pact between unions and employers — the historic Saltsjöbaden agreement of 1938, which institutionalised bargaining instead of conflict — successive social democratic governments built one of the most advanced welfare states in the world: universal pensions, public health and education, unemployment insurance, housing, childcare and a policy of equality. All of it financed with high taxes and sustained by a highly competitive export-driven industrial economy.
That "Swedish model" — prosperous capitalism plus a generous welfare state, in a neutral and stable country — made Sweden an admired reference point around the world during the Cold War, a supposed "third way" between liberal capitalism and communism. Sweden became a byword for welfare, design, gender equality and international solidarity. Its most international political figure, prime minister Olof Palme, embodied that progressive country critical of the great powers, until he was shot dead in the middle of a Stockholm street in February 1986, a crime that shook the country and which, after decades of investigation, remains without a conclusive solution.
The north of Sweden is, from time immemorial, the land of the Sami, the only recognised indigenous people of the European Union, whose territory, Sápmi, stretches across the north of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia without matching any border. For centuries the Sami lived from fishing, hunting and, above all, reindeer herding, in long seasonal migrations. The Swedish state gradually extended its control over Sápmi: forced Christianisation that persecuted the traditional cult and the shamanic drums, land colonisation, mining and railways that fragmented the reindeer routes. The Sami language and culture were pushed aside and stigmatised.
Swedish policy towards the Sami had particularly dark chapters. Under the slogan "lapp ska vara lapp" — "the Lapp must remain a Lapp" — the state imposed at the start of the twentieth century a paternalistic system that confined the reindeer Sami to segregated nomad schools of inferior quality, on the argument of "protecting" them from civilisation by keeping them in their supposed natural state. Graver still was the role of racial biology: in 1922 the State Institute for Racial Biology was founded in Uppsala, the first of its kind funded by a state, which catalogued, measured and photographed the Sami as an "inferior race", in research that included the desecration of graves and the measuring of skulls. Those theories served to justify discrimination and, between the 1920s and 1930s, the tvångsförflyttningar, the forced relocations of Sami families from the north towards the south when Sweden ceded territory to Norway, which broke up entire communities.
Recognition came late and is still not closed. In 1993 the Sametinget, Sweden's Sami Parliament, was inaugurated, a representative body with limited powers. In 2020 a historic Supreme Court ruling (the Girjas case) recognised a Sami community's exclusive rights over hunting and fishing on its traditional lands, against the state. And in 2021 the government set up a Truth Commission to investigate the historical abuses against the Sami, following Norway's example. Mining and wind farms in Sápmi still generate conflict today with reindeer herding. The history of the Sami — silenced for generations — is an essential, and still uncomfortable, part of the Swedish national story.
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In the middle of the Baltic Sea, the island of Gotland held for centuries a privileged commercial position, halfway between the Swedish, German, Baltic and Russian lands. Its great city, Visby, became in the Middle Ages one of the largest trading centres in northern Europe. The Gotlandic farmer-merchants, the gutes, traded across the whole Baltic, and Visby entered the orbit of the powerful Hanseatic League, the confederation of German merchant cities, of which it was one of the most important nodes. Merchants came to the city from Lübeck, Riga, Novgorod and the whole Baltic basin.
From that golden age, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, one of the best-preserved medieval ensembles in northern Europe survives. Visby keeps its thirteenth-century wall intact — more than three kilometres of stone with dozens of towers — an extremely rare case in Scandinavia, as well as the ruins of a dozen great Gothic churches, testimony to the wealth and piety of its merchants, and a weave of medieval lanes and warehouses. For all of that, Visby was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco as an exceptionally well-preserved Hanseatic town.
That commercial splendour was not free of tension: within Gotland itself, the rich burghers of Visby — many of them German-speaking — clashed with the gute farmers of the interior, in conflicts that came to arms. And above all, the island's prosperity made it a coveted target. In the middle of the fourteenth century, Visby began to decline against Lübeck and other Hanseatic cities, and its wealth drew the eye of the king of Denmark, which would lead to one of the greatest tragedies of medieval Scandinavia.
On 22 July 1361, King Valdemar IV of Denmark — Valdemar Atterdag — landed on the west coast of Gotland with an army of between 2,000 and 2,500 men, mostly experienced Danish and German mercenaries, determined to seize the rich island. Facing him, the defence of Gotland fell to a peasant militia of some 2,000 gutes, ordinary people with little or no military experience, many of them old men, boys and poorly armed men.
The outcome was a massacre. On 27 July, before the walls of Visby, the professional Danish army annihilated the Gotlandic militia: it is reckoned that close to 1,800 defenders died in a single day, almost all of those who had come out to fight. The burghers of Visby, dug in behind their walls, did not come to the peasants' aid and, to save the town from being sacked, opened the gates and paid Valdemar an enormous ransom. Legend has it that the king demanded three great vats in the square be filled with gold and silver. Gotland fell under Danish control.
The tragedy left a chilling archaeological record. The bodies of the fallen peasants were buried in mass graves next to the wall, at the place called Korsbetningen. Excavated at the start of the twentieth century, those graves brought to light more than 1,100 skeletons, many still in their armour and bearing the atrocious marks of sword, axe and arrow wounds. It is one of the most important finds of European medieval archaeology about war: for the first time it was possible to study, bone by bone, how people killed and died in a battle of the Middle Ages. The defeat of 1361 also marked the definitive decline of Visby and of Hanseatic Gotland.
Gotland has a history and even an identity of its own within Sweden. Its ancient inhabitants, the gutes, spoke their own language, gutnisk, related to Norse but distinct from Swedish, and governed themselves with notable autonomy. The Gutasaga, a medieval chronicle, tells the legendary origin of the island and how the Gotlanders submitted voluntarily to the king of Sweden in exchange for keeping their own laws. The island is strewn with remains from the Iron Age and the Viking age: above all the famous Gotland "picture stones" (bildstenar), limestone slabs carved with ships, warriors and mythological scenes, unique in Scandinavia, and enormous hoards of Arab and European silver, proof of its extremely intense trade.
After the catastrophe of 1361, Gotland passed through very different hands. For a time it was a lair of the Victual Brothers, Baltic pirates, and it was under Danish control for long periods. In fact, and unlike what is usually believed, Gotland remained Danish well after the Middle Ages: it did not pass definitively to Sweden until the Peace of Brömsebro in 1645, in the framework of the wars between the two crowns. Only then was the island stably incorporated into the Swedish kingdom.
Over the following centuries, Gotland was a farming and stock-raising island, somewhat apart and conservative, which preserved its medieval heritage precisely because economic decline spared it the great urban redevelopments. That same isolation made it, in the twentieth century, a first-rank tourist destination: today Gotland is the summer island par excellence for Swedes, famous for its light, its beaches, its lamb, its wine and its rauk — strange limestone rock formations on the coast — as well as for medieval Visby. Every summer, its political and cultural life concentrates in the Almedalsveckan, Sweden's great week of political debate.
On the east coast of the mainland, facing the island of Öland, the city of Kalmar held for centuries a strategic position of the first order: it was the stronghold of southeastern Sweden, on the very border with the Denmark that ruled neighbouring Scania and Blekinge. That is why Kalmar was given one of the most important castles in northern Europe. Kalmar Castle, whose origins go back to the twelfth century and which was transformed in the sixteenth by the Vasas into a splendid Renaissance fortress-palace, is today one of the best preserved in Scandinavia and a symbol of early modern Sweden.
It was precisely at Kalmar that the union that would shape late medieval Scandinavia was born, in 1397. There, Queen Margaret of Denmark brought the three Scandinavian kingdoms — Denmark, Sweden and Norway — together under a single monarch, in the so-called Kalmar Union, which gave the city its name in the history books. For more than a century, until Gustav Vasa broke it in 1523, that union tied the fates of the three countries together, and Kalmar was one of its symbolic settings.
Because it was a border city, Kalmar suffered as few others did in the Dano-Swedish wars. It was besieged and fought over again and again, and gave its name to one of those wars, the Kalmar War (1611-1613) between Sweden and Denmark. Only after the Swedish conquest of the southern provinces in 1658 did it stop being a border stronghold and lose its military importance. The old town was moved and rebuilt in the seventeenth century next to the castle, on a regular plan. Today Kalmar keeps a fine historic centre, its baroque cathedral and, above all, its imposing castle, witness to a thousand years of wars, unions and borders in the Baltic.
Öland, the second largest island in Sweden, is a long, narrow tongue of land facing Kalmar, to which it has been joined since 1972 by a six-kilometre bridge. It is the island of sun and wind: one of the sunniest and driest areas in the country, with a low, luminous landscape very different from the rest of Sweden. Its most singular natural feature is the Stora Alvaret, the Great Alvar, a vast limestone steppe with almost no soil, beaten by the wind, with a unique flora adapted to those extreme conditions. That farmed landscape, worked with hardly any change for thousands of years, led to southern Öland being declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco as an exceptional "agricultural landscape".
Öland has an extraordinary density of ancient remains. The island is dotted with Iron Age ring forts, such as the impressive Eketorp or the ghostly Ismantorp, with their stone walls and enclosures, which served as refuges in turbulent times more than fifteen hundred years ago. It also keeps hundreds of wooden windmills — one of the island's symbols — and numerous burial mounds, runestones and grave fields that make Öland an enormous open-air site.
Dominating the south of the island is Borgholm Castle, today a spectacular ruin, in its day one of the greatest fortresses in Sweden. And very close by, the Swedish royal family has its summer residence, Solliden, which has tied Öland to the monarchy since the end of the nineteenth century. An island of ancient forts, windmills, beaches and migratory birds, Öland is today one of Sweden's great summer destinations, where the depth of history is measured in millennia and the landscape keeps the continuous mark of farming since prehistory.
Dalarna, the region of valleys and lakes in central Sweden, holds a special place in the country's history and imagination. It was a land of free farmers and miners, independent and combative people who never knew serfdom and who had a voice in their assemblies. Out of that tradition of autonomy came, in the 1430s, the great rebellion of Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, a mining chieftain from Dalarna who led a popular uprising against the taxes and the administrators of the king of the Kalmar Union, and who summoned what is usually considered Sweden's first representative assembly. Engelbrekt, murdered in 1436, was remembered as a hero of Swedish liberty.
A century later, Dalarna was decisive again. In the winter of 1520-1521, after the Stockholm Bloodbath, the young nobleman Gustav Eriksson Vasa arrived here as a fugitive, looking for support to rebel against the Danish king Christian II. At first the Dalarna farmers hesitated and Gustav, discouraged, set off in flight towards Norway. But the Dalecarlians changed their minds, sent their best skiers after him and brought him back to lead them. With them began the war of liberation that would carry Gustav Vasa to the throne in 1523 and found modern Sweden.
That ride across the snow was engraved in the national memory and is the origin of the Vasaloppet, the largest cross-country ski race in the world, which since 1922 has been run every year over 90 kilometres between Sälen and Mora, retracing in reverse the route of Gustav Vasa's flight. Because of its role in these founding episodes, Dalarna became over time a sort of "heartland province" of Sweden, a symbol of peasant freedom and of the national spirit.
At the heart of Dalarna is Falun and its copper mine, the Falu Gruva, one of the most important places in the economic history of Sweden and of Europe. Worked from at least the ninth century and in full activity throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the "Great Copper Mountain" (Stora Kopparberget) came to produce in the seventeenth century close to two thirds of the world's copper. The company that ran it, Stora Kopparberg, is considered one of the oldest continuously operating companies in the world.
That copper was, literally, what financed the Swedish empire. The wars of Gustavus Adolphus and his successors, the armies that fought in the Thirty Years' War, the machinery of the Age of Greatness were paid for in good part with copper exports from Falun. The mine was a colossal and dangerous operation: in 1687 its enormous central cavity collapsed and formed the giant crater that still astonishes visitors today. Falun, with its mine and its mining landscape, is a Unesco World Heritage Site.
Out of Falun also came one of the most recognisable features of Sweden: falu rödfärg, Falun red. This dark red pigment, a by-product of the mine, became from the sixteenth century the paint used to cover — and still used to cover — the wooden houses of the whole country. That deep red, which originally imitated the look of brick and protected the wood, is today the colour par excellence of the Swedish rural landscape: the little red gabled houses, so bound up with the idyllic image of Sweden, owe their colour to the old copper mountain of Dalarna.
No Swedish region is so bound up with folklore and national identity as Dalarna. It was here that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Sweden was looking to define its national soul, artists and romantics found the "authentic" Sweden: that of free farmers, red houses, traditional dress, fiddle music and the old customs that had been preserved here better than anywhere else. Dalarna thus became the country's symbol province, the one that appears on the postcards and in the imagination when people think of "Swedishness".
Its most famous emblem is the Dalahäst, the Dala horse: a small carved wooden figure painted red with floral motifs (the kurbits technique), which the farmers around Mora carved on the long winter nights as a toy and which, after being shown at the 1939 New York World's Fair, became the souvenir and the national symbol of Sweden par excellence. Alongside it, traditions such as the great celebration of Midsommar — the summer solstice, with the maypole, the flower crowns and the dances — have in Dalarna their liveliest and most photographed expression.
Two painters fixed that idyllic image for good. Anders Zorn, born in Mora, portrayed the people and the festivals of Dalarna with a luminous realism and created a museum in his home town. And Carl Larsson, from his house at Sundborn, painted scenes of a simple, colourful and harmonious family life that spread around the world and defined a certain ideal of the Swedish home — light, simplicity, nature — that still influences the country's design and aesthetics today. Dalarna is, to a large extent, the Sweden that Sweden wanted to be.
North of Dalarna stretches a different world: Swedish Lapland, the Swedish part of Sápmi, the ancestral territory of the Sami people, which runs on across the north of Norway, Finland and Russia without matching any border. It is an immense, thinly populated land of boreal forests, rivers, mountains and Arctic tundra, where the Sami have lived for millennia from hunting, fishing and, above all, reindeer herding, following the herds on seasonal migrations between the inland forests and the mountains.
A good part of that Lapland is today a Unesco World Heritage Site under the name Laponia: a vast complex of national parks — Sarek, Padjelanta, Muddus — and reserves that Unesco protects both for its wild nature, one of the last great untouched areas in Europe, and for its cultural value as a territory where the Sami keep alive a way of life and a reindeer transhumance with prehistoric roots. It is one of the few places in the world recognised at the same time for its natural and its cultural heritage.
The history of the Sami of this region is also, however, a history of colonisation and of harm. The expansion of the Swedish state, mining, the railways, the great hydroelectric dams that flooded valleys and the forestry replanting gradually cut back and fragmented their lands and their herding routes. To that was added a policy of assimilation and segregation — nomad schools of lower quality, the racial biology of the early twentieth century, the forced relocations of families from the north — which for generations stigmatised their language and their culture. The recognition of the Sami as an indigenous people, the Swedish Sami Parliament (1993), the ruling in the Girjas case (2020) on their hunting and fishing rights and the Truth Commission set up in 2021 are part of a redress still under way, while mining and wind farms continue to generate conflict in Sápmi.
Kiruna, the northernmost city in Sweden, was born of iron. At the end of the nineteenth century, the working of the immense iron ore deposits in the mountains of Kiirunavaara and Luossavaara, deep in the Arctic, gave rise to the company LKAB (Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara AB). In 1900 its director Hjalmar Lundbohm founded Kiruna there as a model company town, planned to give the miners — in extreme conditions of cold and darkness — decent housing and services. The Kiruna mine is the largest underground iron mine in the world.
Getting that ore to market demanded a titanic piece of work: the Malmbanan, the "ore railway", laid across tundra and mountain to the Norwegian port of Narvik, on the Atlantic, which does not freeze in winter thanks to the Gulf Stream. Opened in 1903, this line joined the deposits of Lapland with the sea and turned the iron of northern Sweden into one of the pillars of the national economy and into a coveted strategic resource — including during the Second World War, when Nazi Germany depended heavily on Swedish ore.
Today Kiruna is at the centre of one of the most singular urban projects in the world: the city is moving. The mine has dug so far underground that the ground on which the city centre stands is cracking and sinking, and in order to go on extracting iron without the city collapsing, LKAB and the municipality decided to move Kiruna several kilometres to the east. Since the 2010s a new centre and thousands of new homes have been built, and some emblematic buildings — such as Kiruna's famous wooden church, considered one of the most beautiful in Sweden — are being moved whole on platforms. The operation, which is due to be completed around the 2030s, makes Kiruna a world case of a city that moves so as not to be swallowed by its own mine.
Northwest of Kiruna, already very close to the Norwegian border, Abisko National Park is one of the natural jewels of the Swedish Arctic. Created in 1909 — it was one of the first national parks in Europe, in the same pioneering batch with which Sweden introduced the category — it protects a glacial valley around Lake Torneträsk and the gorge of the Abiskojåkka river, in a landscape of mountains, birch woods and tundra traditionally travelled by the Sami and their reindeer. The arrival of the ore railway, at the start of the twentieth century, opened this remote region to scientists and to the first hikers.
Abisko is famous the world over today for two phenomena of the Arctic sky. In summer, the sun does not set here for weeks: it is the land of the midnight sun, where in the middle of June you can walk in the mountains at any hour in daylight. In winter, on the other hand, the long polar night makes Abisko one of the best places on the planet to watch the northern lights. A peculiar microclimate — the so-called "Abisko blue hole", an area of clear skies caused by the effect of the mountains on the clouds — means there are frequently clear nights here when the rest of the north is clouded over, which draws travellers from all over the world to its aurora observation station.
Abisko is also one of the ends of the Kungsleden, the "King's Trail", the great hiking route of Swedish Lapland, which runs for more than 400 kilometres through the national parks of the north, among them the Sarek massif and the surroundings of Kebnekaise, the highest mountain in Sweden. A scientific station for more than a century, a gateway to the wild nature of the Arctic and a privileged balcony over the polar sky, Abisko condenses the fascination with the far north that is also part of Swedish identity.
For almost all of its history, Scania (Skåne) was not Swedish but Danish. The province, at the southern tip of the Scandinavian peninsula, was part of the kingdom of Denmark from the days of Harald Bluetooth in the tenth century, and for centuries was one of its richest and most populous regions, with the Öresund strait as an inland Danish waterway, not a border. Together with neighbouring Halland and Blekinge, Scania made up the area known as Skåneland, the agricultural heart of Denmark.
Because of its position, Scania was for centuries the great battlefield of the endless wars between Denmark and Sweden. Its fate changed for good in 1658: after a lightning campaign in which the Swedish king Charles X Gustav marched his army across the frozen straits of the Baltic and threatened Copenhagen, Denmark was forced to sign the humiliating Peace of Roskilde, ceding Scania, Halland, Blekinge and Bohuslän to Sweden. At a stroke, Sweden gained the whole south of the peninsula and secured at last the eastern shore of the Öresund.
The change of sovereignty was neither peaceful nor immediate. Denmark tried to recover its lost provinces in the Scanian War (1675-1679), a brutal war that left the region devastated. The decisive battle was that of Lund, in December 1676, one of the bloodiest in Scandinavian history, which ended in a costly Swedish victory. The resistance of the pro-Danish Scanian peasants, the snapphanar, was fought down with extreme harshness. Only then did Scania stay firmly in Swedish hands.
Winning Scania was one thing; turning it Swedish was another. Its inhabitants were Danish in language, culture, Church and loyalty, and Copenhagen was much closer than Stockholm. To assimilate the province, the Swedish crown set in motion, above all from the 1680s, a deliberate policy of Swedification (försvenskning): it imposed Swedish in the administration, the Church and the school; it forced the Danish clergy to swear loyalty to the Swedish king or leave; and it tried to cut the ties with Denmark.
A key piece of that strategy was cultural. In 1666, Sweden founded Lund University, the second oldest in the country, with the explicit aim of training the elites of the new province in a Swedish and Lutheran setting, so that they would stop going to study in Copenhagen. Lund was already an old episcopal city: it had been the seat of the Danish archbishopric since the beginning of the twelfth century and a great religious centre of the north, with its imposing Romanesque cathedral — consecrated in 1145 — one of the most remarkable medieval churches in Scandinavia, famous for its crypt and its astronomical clock.
Swedification eventually succeeded: over the generations, Scania integrated fully into Sweden. But the Danish mark did not disappear. It survived in the landscape — churches, castles, half-timbered houses — in the customs, in the food and, above all, in the speech: the Scanian dialect, skånska, with its characteristic guttural r and its intonation, remains clearly different from the Swedish of the north and keeps an obvious kinship with Danish, a daily reminder of the thousand years in which this land looked towards Copenhagen.
Unlike the rest of Sweden — a country of forests, lakes, rock and poor soils — Scania is flat, open and extraordinarily fertile land. Its great plains of dark earth, among the most productive in Scandinavia, made the province the country's granary. Wheat and barley are grown here and, very characteristically, sugar beet, and here a good part of Swedish farming and livestock is concentrated. The landscape — rolling fields, rows of willows, castles and whitewashed churches — is more reminiscent of Denmark or northern Germany than of the Sweden of the conifers.
That agricultural wealth sustained for centuries a dense farming population and a powerful landowning nobility, which left the province sown with castles and great manorial estates, many of them in Danish Renaissance style. Scania is by far the province with the most castles in Sweden. The abundance of the land also made it a relatively prosperous and densely populated region, very different from the empty north.
With industrialisation, that agricultural base combined with the food industry — sugar refineries, slaughterhouses, factories — and with an early railway network. Medium-sized cities such as Kristianstad, Hässleholm or Landskrona grew on the back of farming and industry. Today Scania remains Sweden's pantry and, thanks to the bridge over the Öresund, one of the most dynamic regions in the country, integrated into a large cross-border region with the Danish capital. The combination of fertile land, Danish history and modernity makes Scania a different Sweden, more continental and more Mediterranean in its climate and its character.
Malmö, the largest city in Scania and the third in Sweden, sums up the history of the province. It was a prosperous Hanseatic and Danish city in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance — its main square, Stortorget, and its castle, Malmöhus, built on the orders of the Danish king Christian III, are the reminders — the second city of Denmark until it passed to Sweden in 1658. With industrialisation it became a great working-class industrial city, and its symbol was the Kockums shipyard, one of the largest in the world, whose colossal crane dominated the skyline for decades.
The closure of Kockums, in the shipbuilding crisis of the eighties and nineties, plunged Malmö into a harsh restructuring, with unemployment and decline. The city reacted with an ambitious transformation: it bet on the university, on services and on technology, and remodelled its old industrial port areas. The emblem of that rebirth is the Turning Torso, a twisting 190-metre skyscraper opened in 2005, the tallest in Scandinavia for years, raised on the very spot where the shipyard used to be.
The great change, however, came with the Öresund bridge, opened in the year 2000: a work of almost 16 kilometres, part bridge and part tunnel, which finally joined Malmö with Copenhagen by road and rail, something unthinkable during the centuries when the strait was a frontier of war. The bridge turned Malmö and Copenhagen into a single large cross-border metropolitan region, the Öresundsregion, and gave Scania back its old closeness to Denmark. Malmö is also today one of the most multicultural cities in Sweden, with a large population of immigrant origin, which has placed it at the centre of Swedish debates about integration, a face of the country very different from the Scandinavian cliché.
On the south coast of Scania, facing the Baltic, Ystad is one of the towns with the most historic charm in Sweden. Its old quarter holds more than three hundred half-timbered houses — korsvirke — from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a type of architecture characteristic of the south, clearly Danish and German in root, which barely exists in the rest of Sweden. That maze of lanes and cross-beamed houses, together with the medieval Franciscan monastery and the old church of St Mary — from whose tower a watchman still sounds the hours every night, a centuries-old tradition — make Ystad a living museum of historic Scania.
Ystad was already an active trading port in the Middle Ages, tied to Baltic commerce and to the Hanseatic League, and remained for centuries a gateway in and out towards the continent. Even today it is an important ferry port connecting Sweden with Denmark (Bornholm) and with Poland, faithful to its old vocation as a link with the south.
In recent decades, Ystad has won worldwide fame through literature. It is the city of inspector Kurt Wallander, the melancholy detective created by the writer Henning Mankell, whose crime novels — translated into dozens of languages and adapted for film and television — are set in Ystad and its surroundings. The success of "Wallander" turned the city and the Scanian countryside into a place of pilgrimage for fans of Nordic noir, the genre that has made Scandinavia famous. Between half-timbered houses, Baltic beaches and fields of rapeseed, Ystad offers one of the softest and brightest scenes in Sweden.
Before Sweden existed as a kingdom, the sacred and political power of the Svear was concentrated at Gamla Uppsala, Old Uppsala, a few kilometres north of today's city. Three enormous royal mounds still stand there — the Kungshögar — from the middle of the sixth century, under which kings of the legendary Yngling dynasty were buried with their weapons and precious objects. Around them stretched a vast ritual landscape with long rows of stones, feasting halls and assembly places: the centre of a kingdom in the making.
Gamla Uppsala was, according to medieval sources, the seat of Sweden's great pagan temple. The German chronicler Adam of Bremen wrote around 1075 that Odin, Thor and Freyr were worshipped there in a temple covered in gold, and that every nine years a sacrifice was held in which the bodies of men and animals were hung in a sacred grove. Historians argue over how much of that account is real and how much is Christian propaganda, but archaeology confirms the religious importance of the place. Here paganism held out when the rest of Scandinavia was already turning Christian.
With conversion, the pagan sacred centre became a Christian one: a church was raised on the old cult site, and Uppsala became the seat of Sweden's archbishopric. Gamla Uppsala thus went from capital of the Norse gods to head of the Swedish Church, in a continuity of sacred power that runs through the whole early history of the country and that makes this plain of burial mounds one of the places most loaded with memory in Scandinavia.
Modern Uppsala grew in the shadow of its status as religious capital. Its Gothic cathedral — the Domkyrka, consecrated in 1435 — is the largest in Scandinavia, with its two towers of almost 119 metres, and in it rest kings such as Gustav Vasa, the botanist Linnaeus and the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Seat of the archbishopric, Uppsala was for centuries the spiritual centre of the country, and remains the primatial see of the Church of Sweden.
In 1477 Uppsala University was founded there, the oldest in Sweden and in all Scandinavia. After a decline, it revived strongly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and became one of the great scientific centres of Europe. Carl von Linné — Linnaeus — taught there, the naturalist who in the eighteenth century created the binomial system for classifying plants and animals, still in use; his botanical garden and his house are preserved as a museum. Anders Celsius also worked there, the astronomer who devised the temperature scale that bears his name. Uppsala was, and remains, a university city par excellence, with its students, its student nations and its centuries-old traditions, such as the celebration of Valborg, Walpurgis Night on 30 April.
Uppsala Castle, built on the orders of Gustav Vasa in the sixteenth century on a hill overlooking the city, is a reminder that Uppsala was also a stage for royal power: it was there that Queen Christina abdicated in 1654. A city of kings, archbishops and scholars, Uppsala condenses as few others the religious, political and scientific history of Sweden, barely an hour from the capital.
Lake Mälaren, which runs inland into Svealand from the Baltic, was in the Viking age a great water highway. On one of its islands, Björkö, Birka flourished, considered the first city in Sweden: an international trading emporium active between the eighth and tenth centuries, where merchants from the Baltic, Russia, the Arab world and western Europe crossed paths. In its graves have been found silks from Byzantium, Arab silver coins and objects from half the known world, proof of the reach of the Varangian trade routes.
Birka also has a place in religious history: in the year 829 the monk Ansgar, sent from the Frankish empire, preached Christianity there for the first time among the Swedes, in an attempt that barely caught on but that earned him the title of "apostle of the North". The city was abandoned around the year 970, perhaps because of the fall in the water level that made navigation difficult, and its commercial role was inherited by neighbouring Sigtuna, still today one of the oldest towns in Sweden.
On the same island, facing Birka, stood Hovgården, a royal estate that controlled trade on Mälaren. The Birka and Hovgården complex was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco as exceptional testimony to Viking trading networks. The whole Mälaren area is also strewn with runestones and sites from the period, which makes this region an enormous open-air museum of the Viking world out of which, to a large extent, Sweden itself came.
Stockholm was born of geography. At the exact point where Lake Mälaren drains into the Baltic, a handful of islets closed the passage between the fresh water and the salt, an ideal place to control trade and to defend. There, around 1252, the regent Birger Jarl fortified an islet and founded the city, whose name — Stockholm, the "islet of logs" — perhaps alludes to the wooden palisades on its shores. On that islet stands today Gamla Stan, the old town, a maze of medieval lanes, houses with ochre façades and squares such as Stortorget, the oldest in the city.
Stockholm grew as a port and trading place, closely tied in the late Middle Ages to the German merchants of the Hanseatic League, who left their mark on the language and the architecture. It gained weight against the old capitals of Sigtuna and Uppsala until, with the consolidation of the kingdom, it became the effective capital of Sweden. In its main square, in 1520, the Stockholm Bloodbath was carried out, the massacre that precipitated the end of the Kalmar Union.
With the imperial rise of the seventeenth century, Stockholm filled with palaces and established itself as the political centre of the Baltic kingdom. The present Royal Palace, one of the largest in Europe, was raised in the eighteenth century after a fire destroyed the medieval castle of Tre Kronor. Spread across fourteen islands joined by bridges, between the lake and the sea, Stockholm — sometimes called "the Venice of the North" — is today a capital of water, design and museums, among them the Vasa, which holds the colossal warship that sank in its own harbour in 1628 and was recovered almost intact three centuries later.
Two symbols condense the Stockholm of the great eras. One is the warship Vasa: launched in 1628 as the pride of the imperial navy of Gustavus II Adolphus, it sank a few minutes after setting off on its maiden voyage, right in Stockholm harbour, because of a stability fault. It stayed more than three hundred years in the mud of the seabed, which preserved it exceptionally well, until it was raised in 1961. Today, in the Vasa Museum — the most visited in Scandinavia — it is displayed almost whole, a unique window onto the Sweden of the Age of Greatness and its naval ambition.
The other symbol is the Nobel Prize. The chemist and industrialist Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite and one of the great fortunes of industrial Sweden, left his estate on his death in 1896 to establish the prizes that bear his name. Since 1901, every 10 December — the anniversary of his death — the Nobel prizes for Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Economics are awarded in Stockholm, at a solemn ceremony in the Konserthuset followed by a banquet in the City Hall, the Stadshuset, whose famous Golden Hall is one of the city's set pieces. Only the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded elsewhere, in Oslo.
In the twentieth century, Stockholm became the shop window of the Swedish model: capital of design, of the welfare state and of Scandinavian modernity. It was also the stage for its greatest recent political trauma: on 28 February 1986, prime minister Olof Palme was shot dead at the corner of Sveavägen and Tunnelgatan, as he walked home from the cinema with his wife. The crime, never conclusively solved, marked the end of an age of innocence for the country. Today Stockholm combines its medieval old town, its imperial palaces and its image as a clean, green capital at the forefront of design.
In front of the capital opens one of the largest archipelagos in the world: some 30,000 islands, islets and skerries scattered across the Baltic over tens of kilometres, from the inner city out to the open sea. For centuries, that maze of water and rock was above all a natural defensive barrier for Stockholm. To protect it, the crown raised fortresses such as the one at Vaxholm, which from the sixteenth century watched over the main channel into the capital and more than once held off enemy fleets.
The archipelago was also, for generations, a land of fishermen, pilots and farmers who lived off a hard environment, scattered in little red wooden houses. The steam revolution, in the nineteenth century, transformed it: the steamboats — the ångbåtar, like the historic Blidösund — connected the islands with the city and put the archipelago within reach of Stockholmers. The age of summering then began: the capital's middle class built wooden villas on the islands, and the custom of spending summer "i skärgården", in the archipelago, became a central feature of Swedish culture.
That world of islands, jetties and little red houses inspired artists and writers — the playwright August Strindberg portrayed it in his novels — and remains today the great summer refuge of Stockholmers. Islands such as Sandhamn, Grinda, Utö or Fjäderholmarna welcome travellers who work their way through the archipelago by ferry between swims in the Baltic, seafood and long sunsets. It is the Sweden of the allemansrätten, the "everyone's right" to move freely through nature, and of the cult of the short, luminous northern summer.
Gothenburg (Göteborg) was born of a strategic need. For centuries Sweden had barely any outlet to the North Sea and the Atlantic: the Danes controlled both shores of the Öresund strait and charged a toll on everyone who passed. In 1621, King Gustavus II Adolphus founded Gothenburg by royal charter, at the mouth of the Göta river, to give Sweden a great Atlantic port of its own, safe from Danish tolls, on the narrow strip of coast left to it between the Danish and Norwegian possessions.
To raise the city on marshy ground, the crown turned to the best hydraulic engineers of the age: the Dutch. Gothenburg was laid out on the Dutch model, with a network of straight canals and a regular grid, in the style of the Batavia (Jakarta) or the New Amsterdam (New York) that the Dutch were founding at the time. Its first town council reflected that cosmopolitan origin: it was made up of ten Dutchmen, seven Swedes and a Scot. The city's historic centre still lives off those canals and that Dutch layout.
Gothenburg thus became Sweden's great western gate, looking to the North Sea and the Atlantic world, in contrast with Baltic Stockholm. Fortified against Denmark, settled by immigrants from half of Europe, the city had from the start a commercial, open character somewhat apart from the rest of the country, with its own humour and a strong identity. That vocation as a port open to the ocean would mark its whole history.
Gothenburg's great leap came in the eighteenth century with the Swedish East India Company (Svenska Ostindiska Companiet), founded in 1731 and based in the city. For more than eighty years its great sailing ships — the so-called East Indiamen — left Gothenburg bound for Canton, in China, on voyages lasting more than a year, to return loaded with tea, silk, porcelain and spices that were auctioned in the city at enormous profit and resold across Europe.
That trade with the East turned Gothenburg from a fortified place into a prosperous merchants' city. The fortunes of the great traders filled the city with mansions and funded cultural institutions; the Company's own building today houses the City Museum. Chinese tea in particular became fashionable across Scandinavia thanks to these voyages. The adventure ended at the start of the nineteenth century, when wars and competition sank the business, but it left Gothenburg with a mercantile, international vocation it never lost.
That past is still very much alive: between 1995 and 2005 a sailing replica of one of those ships was built in the city, the Götheborg, which sank in 1745 just as it arrived back at its home port. The new Götheborg has repeated the route to China, symbolically joining the city's present with its commercial golden age. Gothenburg kept its status as a great port: today it is the largest in Scandinavia, and out of its shipyards and its seafaring tradition also came a good part of the industrial Sweden of the twentieth century.
North of Gothenburg stretches Bohuslän, a coast of pink granite polished by the ice, bare islands, coves and fishing villages of little white houses. This province belonged to Norway and then to Denmark-Norway until 1658, when it passed to Sweden with the Peace of Roskilde, along with Scania, Halland and Blekinge. Its history therefore looks as much to its western neighbour as to Sweden, and it keeps a strong character of its own.
Life in Bohuslän revolved for centuries around herring. In irregular cycles, enormous shoals of the fish came close to the coast — the so-called sillperioder, "herring periods" — and when they did, they set off genuine economic fevers: the ports filled up, salting and fish-oil factories went up, and money and people arrived from everywhere. When the herring disappeared, sometimes for decades, ruin came back. That swinging rhythm marked the social history of the coast. Later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the canneries flourished: a good share of Scandinavia's tins of sardines and herring came out of these villages.
The other great resource was stone. Bohuslän granite, of excellent quality, was worked intensively at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth; with it, cities across half of Europe were paved and built, and its quarrying drew stonecutters and gave rise to a combative local labour movement. Today Bohuslän is above all a summer destination — villages such as Fjällbacka, Smögen or Grebbestad — famous for its seafood, its lobsters and its oysters, and for landscapes of rock and sea that draw sailors and swimmers from all over Scandinavia. It also holds, at Tanum, some extraordinary Bronze Age rock carvings, a World Heritage Site.
On an island off the Bohuslän coast stands Marstrand, one of the towns with the most history on the west coast. Watching over it from above is the Carlsten fortress, an imposing stone citadel that Sweden began building in the seventeenth century, after taking the region from Denmark-Norway, to defend this border coast. Carlsten worked for a long time as a prison: convicts sentenced to hard labour served their time there, among them the most famous of Swedish outlaws, Lars Andersson, nicknamed "Lasse-Maja", famous for dressing as a woman to commit his robberies, whose legend is still told in the fortress.
Marstrand also lived, like all of Bohuslän, off herring: during the great fishing periods of the eighteenth century it was a bustling, rich port. To attract trade, the Swedish crown went as far as making it a free port, with freedom of religion and of customs, which drew merchants of every kind, including Jews who founded here one of the first communities in Sweden. When the herring disappeared, the prosperity died away.
In the nineteenth century, Marstrand reinvented itself as an elegant spa resort and a centre of sailing. The royal family and Swedish high society chose it as a summer place, and King Oscar II made it fashionable. Since then, Marstrand has been a byword for the sport: it hosts international regattas and is one of the great sailing centres in Scandinavia. With its wooden houses, its fortress and its harbour full of sailing boats, it embodies the shift from the old fishing coast to the coast of leisure and summers that Bohuslän is today.
Gothenburg was one of the engines of Swedish industrialisation. Its port, the largest in the country, and its shipyards made it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a great working-class industrial city. The Gothenburg shipyards — Götaverken, Eriksberg, Lindholmen — came to be among the largest shipbuilders in the world, until the crisis in the sector, in the seventies and eighties, closed them down and forced the city to reinvent itself around services, technology and research.
Sweden's most international company came out of Gothenburg: Volvo, founded there in 1927, which made the city the Swedish capital of the motor car and a worldwide byword for safety and engineering. Together with SKF — the bearings giant, also from Gothenburg — and other firms, Volvo made the city a first-rank industrial centre. The later transformation, with the conversion of the old shipyards on the north bank of the river into a modern district of universities and technology companies, is an example of how the city managed to move from iron and steel to knowledge.
Gothenburg was also the great departure gate of Swedish emigration to America. From its port sailed hundreds of thousands of emigrants who, between 1850 and 1930, crossed the Atlantic bound for the United States, fleeing poverty. Many first took ship to England to board the great liners there; the quay they left from, in the heart of the city, was the last piece of Sweden they saw. That past as an emigrants' port, together with its history of trade with the East and of heavy industry, makes Gothenburg the city most turned towards the sea and the world in all of Sweden.
Facing Gothenburg lies its own archipelago, split into two halves: the southern archipelago, made up of inhabited, car-free islands such as Styrsö, Brännö, Vrångö or Donsö, and the northern archipelago, somewhat wilder. Unlike Stockholm's, this is an urban and accessible archipelago: from the city centre, a tram and a ferry take you in under an hour to islands where no cars run and where life moves by bicycle, on foot or in small boats.
These islands were for centuries fishing communities, with their harbours, their boats and their little wooden houses, many of them tied to the herring and shellfish fishery of the west coast. Some, like Vinga — with its lighthouse, associated with the poet and songwriter Evert Taube, who was born there — hold the seafaring memory of the region. Others kept a military use until a few decades ago, when they defended the entrance to Gothenburg's harbour.
Today the Gothenburg archipelago is the city's great leisure lung: its people escape to the islands at weekends and in summer to swim off the granite rocks, eat freshly caught seafood and enjoy the sea without the bustle of mass tourism. The absence of cars, the wooden houses and the fishing jetties keep the quiet atmosphere of the old west coast, a step away from one of the largest cities in Scandinavia. It is one of the best ways to understand the intimate relationship of Gothenburg, and of the whole of Sweden, with the sea.