🇸🇪 Sweden · Scania (south)
Lund is one of the oldest, prettiest and most cultured cities in Sweden, and one of its best surprises. Only 15 minutes by train from Malmö, it is a charming university city of cobbled streets, wooden houses and gardens, dominated by a thousand-year-old Romanesque cathedral that is one of the most important medieval churches in northern Europe. It combines the weight of a thousand years of history with the youthful energy of one of the best universities in Scandinavia.
Founded by the Danes more than a thousand years ago, Lund was in the Middle Ages the great religious centre of all Scandinavia, the seat of a powerful archbishopric that governed the Church in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Its cathedral, consecrated in 1145, bears witness to that greatness, with its solemn crypt of columns and its famous medieval astronomical clock. Walking through the old town is travelling through centuries of Danish-Swedish history.
But Lund is not just the past. Since 1666, Lund University has given it a young, international, creative pulse, with students from all over the world, picturesque student traditions and a rich cultural life for its size. Museums such as Kulturen (one of the oldest open-air museums in the world), botanical gardens, cafés and bookshops complete the picture. This guide covers the essentials of Lund with a practical and warm eye: what to see, how to get there, what it costs and how to enjoy this jewel of southern Sweden.
Lund was founded around the year 990 by the Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard (or shortly after), at a time when Scania was Danish, and it soon became one of the most important cities in the kingdom of Denmark. In 1103-1104 the archbishopric of Lund was established there, which made the city the religious centre of all Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden and Norway), with enormous ecclesiastical power. Its Romanesque cathedral was consecrated in 1145. Lund was a great medieval centre, with numerous churches and monasteries. With the medieval decline and the Reformation it lost part of its splendour, and in 1658 it passed to Sweden by the Treaty of Roskilde; in 1666 the Swedes founded Lund University to integrate the region. Since then, the university has been the heart of the city. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The far south of Sweden, Danish until 1658: the fertile plain that is the country's granary, the cathedral and university of Lund, the shipyard and the Öresund bridge at Malmö, the half-timbered towns of Ystad and a dialect and an identity that still look towards Denmark.
Read the history of Scania (south) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Lund is one of the oldest cities in Sweden, but to understand its origin you have to remember, once again, that for most of its history it was not Swedish but Danish. Lund was founded towards the end of the tenth century, around the year 990, in the time of the Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard (Sven Tveskägg), in the middle of the Viking period, when Scania was one of the central regions of the kingdom of Denmark. It is thought to have been a royal, planned foundation, on a strategic spot in the fertile interior of Scania.
Very early on, Lund became a place of great importance. Already in the time of King Cnut the Great (Knut den store), who at the start of the eleventh century ruled a vast North Sea empire that took in Denmark, England and Norway, Lund was a prominent city, with its own mint (coins were struck there) and a growing role in the life of the kingdom. The Viking and early medieval town grew with churches first of wood and then of stone, and with a population of craftsmen, merchants and clergy.
Archaeology has revealed beneath the ground of Lund the remains of that early town: workshops, dwellings, early churches and objects of everyday life from the tenth and eleventh centuries, many of them today in the city's museums. That Danish foundation of the Viking age would be the seed of what would become, within a few generations, the religious capital of the whole Scandinavian north of Europe.
The high point of Lund's medieval history came at the start of the twelfth century. In 1103 or 1104, an archbishopric was established in Lund, the first in all Scandinavia. Until then, the Church of the north depended on the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen, in Germany; with the creation of the see of Lund, Scandinavia obtained its own ecclesiastical head, independent of the Germans. And that head was in Lund: the archbishop of Lund became the primate of the whole Scandinavian Church, with authority over Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Lund was thus the religious capital of the entire north.
That enormous ecclesiastical power transformed the city. Lund filled with churches, monasteries, chapels and religious buildings — people spoke of dozens of churches in a relatively small city — and drew clergy, pilgrims, craftsmen and students. The symbol of that splendour is Lund cathedral (Lunds domkyrka), a great Romanesque church of sandstone whose construction advanced over the twelfth century and which was consecrated in 1145. With its twin towers, its solemn crypt of columns and, later, its famous astronomical clock, the cathedral is still today the city's most important monument and one of the best examples of the Romanesque in northern Europe.
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Lund lived its medieval golden age as the centre of religious, cultural and intellectual power in Scandinavia. It was a focus of learning, with cathedral schools, and a point of reference for the whole Nordic Christian world. Its influence far outstripped its size, and its name echoed across northern Europe as the seat of the primate archbishop.
After its medieval peak, Lund entered a long period of relative decline. Several factors came together. On one hand, the rise of other Danish cities, above all Copenhagen, which gained political and economic prominence and pushed Lund away from the centre of power. On the other, the general crises of the late Middle Ages, such as the Black Death of the fourteenth century, which hit the population hard. The city, which had lived off its ecclesiastical power and its central role, gradually lost importance as the world changed around it.
The decisive blow to the old religious Lund came with the Protestant Reformation, in the sixteenth century. When Denmark officially adopted Lutheranism (around 1536), the enormous power of the Catholic Church — and with it that of the archbishopric of Lund — collapsed. The monasteries and convents were dissolved, church property was confiscated, and many of Lund's numerous medieval churches were demolished or fell into disuse. The city that had been the religious capital of Scandinavia lost at a stroke the basis of its greatness. The archbishopric disappeared as a power, and Lund was reduced to a provincial town, a shadow of what it had been.
During that period, Lund remained a Danish city, in Danish Scania, increasingly in the shadow of nearby, thriving Copenhagen, on the other side of the strait. Its cathedral and some buildings survived as witnesses to better times, but the city was waiting, without knowing it, for a radical change that would come in the seventeenth century and give it a new reason to exist.
In 1658, the Treaty of Roskilde changed Lund's fate, as it did that of all Scania: the region passed from Denmark to Sweden. Lund became a Swedish city, although its population was still Danish in language and culture, and the transition was difficult, marked by wars (the Scanian War, 1675-1679) in which Denmark tried to recover the province. Indeed, on the outskirts of Lund in 1676 one of the bloodiest battles in Scandinavian history was fought, the battle of Lund, between the Swedish and Danish armies.
To consolidate its rule over newly annexed Scania and to win over (or train) its elites, Sweden took a momentous decision: in 1666 it founded a university in Lund, Lund University. The idea was to create a centre of study that would train clergy, officials and professionals loyal to the Swedish crown, and that would help 'Swedify' the region, preventing the young people of Scania from going to study in Copenhagen. The university was set up making use of the city's historic prestige and its old ecclesiastical and scholarly tradition.
That foundation was Lund's new beginning. In time, the university grew to become one of the most important and prestigious in Scandinavia, and gave the city a new identity: that of a university city. The following centuries saw science, the humanities and an intense student life flourish in Lund, with famous figures, picturesque traditions and a young, intellectual atmosphere that lasts to this day. The city that had been the religious capital of Scandinavia was reborn as a capital of learning.
Since its refounding as a university city, Lund has never stopped growing in academic and scientific importance. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Lund University expanded enormously and placed itself among the best in northern Europe, with distinguished faculties of humanities, law, medicine, science and technology. Numerous renowned scientists and thinkers have passed through its lecture halls, and Nobel prizes and important advances have come out of its orbit. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Lund has also become a great hub of research and technological innovation: world-class scientific facilities have been set up around it, such as major physics laboratories (synchrotron light and neutron sources), which draw researchers from all over the planet.
That scientific vocation coexists with the preservation of an exceptional historic heritage. Unlike many cities, Lund escaped major destruction and keeps a charming medieval and early modern old town, with its thousand-year-old cathedral as its heart. Institutions such as the Kulturen open-air museum (founded in 1892, one of the oldest in the world) and the university museums preserve and share the long history of the city and of Scania.
Today Lund is a city that combines, within a few kilometres and quite naturally, more than a thousand years of history: the Viking and Danish foundation, the splendour of the archbishopric and the Romanesque cathedral, the transfer to Sweden and the founding of the university, and contemporary scientific strength. With its young, international atmosphere, its student traditions, its cafés and bookshops, and its unique heritage, Lund is one of the cities with the most personality and charm in southern Sweden, a jewel where a thousand-year-old past and the energy of the present live side by side in every street.