🇸🇪 Sweden · Scania (south)
Malmö is the most open and cosmopolitan city in Sweden, and also one of the most surprising. At the far south of the country, a step from Copenhagen across the impressive Öresund bridge, it is a young, multicultural city in full transformation, which has gone from being an industrial port city in crisis to a model of sustainable reinvention, with eco-districts, a futuristic skyline and a vibrant energy.
It also has a past many people do not know about: for centuries Malmö was Danish, one of the main cities of the kingdom of Denmark, and it only passed to Sweden in the seventeenth century. From that origin it keeps its old town, with cobbled squares, half-timbered houses and Malmöhus castle, the oldest Renaissance fortress in Scandinavia. That crossing of Swedish and Danish identities is part of its singular character.
Today Malmö is the Turning Torso, the twisting skyscraper that has become its symbol; the eco-district of Västra Hamnen on the old industrial port; one of the most diverse food scenes in the country thanks to its enormous mix of cultures; and the gateway to Scania and to Denmark. This guide covers the essentials of Malmö with a practical and warm eye: what to see, how to get around by bike, what it costs and how to make the most of the most multicultural city in Sweden.
Malmö is first mentioned in the thirteenth century, and through the Middle Ages and much of the early modern period it was a Danish city — one of the most important in the kingdom of Denmark — prosperous thanks to the Öresund herring trade and to its strategic position facing Copenhagen. Malmöhus castle was built in the sixteenth century. By the Treaty of Roskilde of 1658, Scania and Malmö passed to Sweden, which 'Swedified' the region after centuries of Danish rule. In the nineteenth century Malmö industrialised strongly (the Kockums shipyards, textiles, food), and in the twentieth it lived through the rise and the crisis of that industry. The building of the Öresund bridge (2000), which joined it to Copenhagen, and its reinvention as a city of knowledge and sustainability transformed it. 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.
To understand Malmö you have to start with a fact that surprises many people: for most of its history, Malmö was not Swedish but Danish. The city is first mentioned in documents of the thirteenth century, and from then on and for some four centuries it was part of the kingdom of Denmark, of which the province of Scania (Skåne) was one of the richest and most populous regions. Malmö became the second most important city in Denmark, after the capital, Copenhagen, sitting right opposite on the other side of the Öresund strait.
Malmö's medieval prosperity was tied, as in so many ports of southern Scandinavia, to herring. The enormous herring shoals of the Öresund and the Baltic turned the city into a great centre for fishing, salting and trading this fish, in high demand across Catholic Europe (which ate it on the many fast days). Merchants of the Hanseatic League traded actively in Malmö, which held great herring markets. That fishing and trading wealth made the city grow and paid for its main monuments.
From that Danish, medieval Malmö survive jewels such as the church of St Peter (Sankt Petri kyrka), an imposing fourteenth-century Gothic brick church inspired by the churches of northern Germany, and the layout of the old town. The city was fortified and was a Danish bastion facing the Baltic. Its closeness to Copenhagen — today its great asset — was then natural, since both shores of the Öresund belonged to the same kingdom and formed the heart of Danish power.
The sixteenth century was a decisive time for Malmö. The kings of Denmark strengthened the city with the building of Malmöhus castle (Malmöhus slott), a Renaissance fortress raised on top of an earlier medieval castle, intended to defend the city and to control the strategic Öresund strait and the lucrative toll Denmark charged the ships that crossed it. Malmöhus, with its sturdy round towers and its moats, is today the oldest surviving Renaissance fortress in Scandinavia, and over its history it was a royal residence, a military stronghold, a mint (where coins were struck) and, later, a prison.
Malmö was also one of the focal points of the Protestant Reformation in Scandinavia. The city, with its thriving merchant middle class and its contacts with northern Germany (the cradle of Lutheranism), embraced the ideas of the Reformation early, even before Denmark officially adopted it. Reformist preachers were active in Malmö in the 1520s and 1530s, and the city became a bastion of Protestantism. The church of St Peter was the setting for those religious changes, and reformist texts in Danish were printed in Malmö.
That sixteenth century was, taken as a whole, a period of splendour for Danish Malmö: prosperous from trade, fortified by the castle and active in the religious and cultural life of the kingdom. But tensions between Denmark and the emerging Swedish power to the north would keep growing, and Scania, because of its border position, would become the great battlefield of that rivalry, with consequences that would change Malmö's fate for good.
The great turning point in Malmö's history came in 1658. After a war in which the Swedish king Charles X Gustav invaded Denmark, even marching his army across the frozen straits, Denmark was forced to sign the Treaty of Roskilde, one of the most humiliating in its history. Under that treaty, Denmark ceded to Sweden its provinces in the south of the Scandinavian peninsula: Scania (with Malmö and Lund), Halland, Blekinge and Bohuslän. At a stroke, Malmö went from being one of the main cities of Denmark to being a Swedish border town.
The transition was neither peaceful nor quick. The population of Scania was Danish in language, culture and loyalties, and there was resistance. In the following decades new wars were fought (such as the Scanian War, 1675-1679), in which Denmark tried to recover the region, with Malmö as a key stronghold: the city and its Malmöhus castle withstood Danish sieges. Sweden, to consolidate its rule, undertook a policy of 'Swedification' of Scania: Swedish was imposed in the Church, the administration and education, Lund University was founded (1666) as an instrument for training elites loyal to Sweden, and the resistance (the 'snapphanar', pro-Danish guerrillas) was hunted down.
Over time, and after further conflicts, Swedish rule took firm hold. Scania and Malmö were integrated into Sweden, though keeping features of their own: even today the southern dialect (the 'skånska') sounds softer and more 'Danish' than the rest of Swedish, and the region keeps a particular cultural identity, straddling the two inheritances. Malmö thus entered the modern age as a Swedish city, though for a long time it remained a relatively small and provincial place, far from the splendour of its Danish days.
Malmö woke from its slumber with the Industrial Revolution. Over the nineteenth century, the city was transformed into a great industrial and port centre in southern Sweden. The modern harbour was built, the railway arrived, and textile, food and engineering industries flourished and, above all, shipbuilding. The symbol of that era was Kockums, a shipyard founded in the nineteenth century that became one of the largest in the world in the twentieth, with its giant crane (the Kockumskranen) dominating the city skyline and employing thousands of workers. Malmö became a typical industrial working-class city, with a strong trade union movement and a long social democratic tradition (it was a stronghold of Swedish socialism).
But the second half of the twentieth century brought a deep crisis. As in Gothenburg, shipbuilding went into decline in the face of Asian competition, and Malmö's shipyards closed or shrank drastically during the 1970s and 1980s. Kockums stopped building large ships, and the city lost thousands of industrial jobs, sinking into a serious economic and social depression. The enormous Kockums crane, symbol of the old industrial Malmö, was finally dismantled and sold to South Korea in 2002, in a gesture heavy with symbolism about the end of an era.
Malmö had to reinvent itself completely. The city bet on education (with the founding of Malmö University in 1998), technology, services, culture and sustainability. The old industrial harbour, where the shipyards were, was transformed into the eco-district of Västra Hamnen, crowned by the Turning Torso skyscraper (2005), by the architect Santiago Calatrava, the city's new symbol. The building of the Öresund bridge (2000), which joined Malmö with Copenhagen, was the other great engine of the transformation, integrating the city into a dynamic cross-border region.
Twenty-first-century Malmö is one of the most dynamic and transformed cities in Sweden. The opening of the Öresund bridge in the year 2000 was a before and after: for the first time since the last glaciation, Scania was joined by land to the continent, and Malmö came to form, together with Copenhagen, a large cross-border metropolitan region (the 'Öresund region'), with tens of thousands of people crossing daily between Sweden and Denmark to work and study. The closeness of Copenhagen's big international airport, only half an hour away, opened Malmö to the world.
The city reinvented itself as a centre of knowledge, culture and sustainability. The Västra Hamnen district, on the old shipyards, became an international model of ecological urban planning, with renewable energy and green spaces by the sea, presided over by the Turning Torso. Malmö University drew students, and the city developed technology, video game, biomedicine and services sectors. The old shipyard city gave way to a modern, young (with one of the youngest populations in Europe) and creative place.
Malmö is today, above all, the most multicultural city in Sweden: more than 40% of its inhabitants have foreign roots, with more than 180 nationalities. That diversity, visible in districts such as Möllevången, has brought enormous cultural and culinary richness, and also challenges of integration and social cohesion that the city is facing. With its mix of Danish and Swedish inheritances, its converted industrial past, its commitment to green living and its vibrant diversity, Malmö has become a laboratory of contemporary Sweden, open, urban and constantly transforming.