🇸🇪 Sweden · Baltic islands
Öland is an island unlike anything else in Sweden: a long, thin tongue of land in the Baltic, so narrow that at many points you can see the sea on both sides, covered with fields, windmills, sandy beaches and a strange limestone steppe that exists nowhere else in the country. It is a bridge away from the city of Kalmar — the majestic Ölandsbron, more than six kilometres long — and in summer it becomes one of the great holiday destinations for Swedes, who come for the sun, the nature and a very long history.
Because Öland is also an island of lighthouses, castles and kings. At Borgholm stands the largest castle ruin in northern Europe, an imposing stone skeleton on a cliff. A few metres away, at Solliden palace, the Swedish royal family has spent its summers for more than a century. In the south, the Stora Alvaret steppe — a unique landscape of grassland over limestone, a World Heritage Site — holds graves, forts and windmills from prehistory, and the bird reserves draw watchers from all over the world.
This guide covers Öland with a practical and warm eye: how to cross the bridge from Kalmar, what to see in the north and in the south, how to get around (key: a car or a bike is worth having, because public transport is limited), when to go — summer is unbeatable — and what everything costs, with the usual note about how expensive and cashless Sweden is. A sunny, windy and surprising island, perfect for combining beach, nature, windmills and thousand-year-old monuments.
Öland has been inhabited for millennia: its soil holds megalithic tombs, runestones, stone circles and, above all, prehistoric Iron Age forts, such as the famous Eketorp, today reconstructed. In the Middle Ages it was a royal hunting ground and a strategic territory; at Borgholm a castle was raised that the Swedish kings turned into a fortress and Renaissance palace, until a fire in 1806 left it as the spectacular ruin you visit today. In the nineteenth century, Öland went through hard times of poverty and emigration: thousands of islanders left for the United States. The royal family's connection with the island dates from 1906, when the Solliden summer palace was built. In 1972 the Öland bridge was opened, transforming the island by joining it to the mainland. In 2000, the agricultural landscape of southern Öland — with its Stora Alvaret steppe and its thousand-year-old way of working the land — was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The great islands of the Swedish Baltic: Gotland, with the walled medieval Visby of the Hanseatic League and the tragedy of 1361; sunny Öland, of Iron Age forts, windmills and steppe; and Kalmar, whose castle saw the birth of the union of the three Scandinavian kingdoms.
Read the history of Baltic islands →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few places in Sweden keep a human mark as long and as visible as Öland. The island has been inhabited since the Stone Age, more than five thousand years ago, and its limestone ground — where vegetation is sparse and the land barely changes — preserved the traces of that thousand-year presence as few places have. Walking Öland is walking across an immense archaeological landscape.
From the oldest periods there remain megalithic tombs, burial chambers, stone circles set out in the shape of ships (skeppssättningar) and standing stones dotted across the fields. But the most characteristic feature of Öland are its prehistoric forts: circular walled enclosures of the Iron Age, raised above all between the third and sixth centuries AD, in a time of instability and conflict. The remains of more than a dozen of these forts are known on the island, an extraordinary number.
The most famous is Eketorp, in the south, unique because it was completely excavated and then partly reconstructed on its foundations, which lets you walk it almost as it was. It had several lives over a thousand years: it began as a fortified Iron Age enclosure, was abandoned and reoccupied, and in the Middle Ages worked as a fortress and village. Another notable fort is Gråborg, the largest on the island. These enclosures served as refuges for the population and their livestock in times of danger, and they speak of an organised, warlike and numerous society.
The Iron Age also left on Öland some of the most impressive finds in Scandinavian archaeology, such as the gold hoards and the deposits of weapons and objects found at various points. All of it confirms that, already in antiquity, this narrow Baltic island was a densely populated place connected with the rest of Scandinavia and with Europe.
During the Middle Ages, Öland came under a special regime that would shape its history: it became a royal hunting ground. The Swedish kings reserved for themselves the exclusive right to hunt deer and other game on the island, and subjected its inhabitants to strict rules that protected the royal hunt above the interests of the farmers. That status as 'the king's island' conditioned Öland life for centuries: farmers could not freely fence their land or hunt, and had to live alongside the protected wildlife.
In the north of the island, on a cliff with sea views, a fortress was raised in the Middle Ages to defend Öland and control the Kalmar strait: Borgholm castle. Its position was strategic, because the strait between the island and the mainland was a key passage in the Baltic, fought over by Swedes and Danes in the endless Nordic wars.
The castle grew and changed. Its great age came in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the kings of the Vasa house and their successors rebuilt it as a fortified palace in Renaissance and baroque style. King Charles X Gustav, in the seventeenth century, commissioned its transformation into an imposing square residence with four towers, a work on which the architect Nicodemus Tessin the Elder worked. During the wars between Sweden and Denmark, Borgholm was besieged and damaged several times, and its fortunes followed the shifts of the border.
In time, with no military function left, the castle lost importance and fell into neglect. The final blow came in 1806, when a great fire devastated it completely. Instead of rebuilding it, it was left as a ruin, and so was born the monument we admire today: the largest castle shell in northern Europe, a symbol of Öland and a witness to its centuries as an island of kings.
The nineteenth century was, for much of Öland, a hard time. The island, with its poor limestone soil and its often dry summers, was vulnerable to bad harvests, and the population had grown beyond what the land could sustain. The restrictions inherited from its status as a royal hunting ground, the shortage of arable land and the periodic famines pushed many Öland people into a poverty hard to bear.
As in so many rural regions of Sweden, the answer was emigration. Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, hundreds of thousands of Swedes left the country for North America, in one of the largest emigrations in European history in proportion to population: it is reckoned that around 1.3 million Swedes emigrated, above all to the United States. Öland contributed a significant share of its inhabitants to that wave. Whole families left their stone houses and their windmills to look for land and work in Minnesota, Illinois or Nebraska.
The impact on the island was enormous. Villages emptying out, fields left without hands, a demographic bleed that marked it for generations. Even today there are houses and farms on Öland abandoned from that period, and many descendants of Öland emigrants in North America come back to the island to look for their roots. The epic of Swedish emigration was immortalised by the writer Vilhelm Moberg in his famous series of novels about the emigrants of Småland, the neighbouring region, a phenomenon identical to the one Öland lived through.
That stage of poverty and exodus contrasts with the bright, summery image the island has today. But it is an essential part of its history, and it explains many of its landscapes: the stone walls, the windmills, the village houses and that mix of melancholy and endurance you can still sense in the Öland countryside.
At the start of the twentieth century, Öland's fortunes began to change, and the monarchy had a lot to do with it. In 1906 Solliden was opened, a summer palace built on the initiative of Queen Victoria of Sweden, wife of King Gustaf V. The queen, in delicate health, was looking for a sunny, mild place, and found in Öland — one of the sunniest regions in the country — and in the style of the Italian villas she loved the ideal setting. Solliden, with its Mediterranean gardens facing the Baltic, became from then on the summer residence of the Swedish royal family.
That royal connection gave Öland prestige and visibility. Generation after generation, the kings and their families spent their summers at Solliden, and the island became associated with the bright image of the Swedish summer. Today, every 14 July, Crown Princess Victoria's birthday is celebrated at Solliden with an event closely followed across the country, and the palace gardens are one of the most popular visits on the island.
But Öland's great transformation came in 1972, with the opening of the Öland bridge (Ölandsbron). At more than six kilometres, it was at the time the longest bridge in Europe, and for the first time it joined the island to the mainland permanently, replacing the ferries. The effect was immediate and profound: Öland went from being a remote, hard-to-reach place to being a destination a step from Kalmar. Tourism took off, the economy changed, and the island established itself as one of the great holiday places for Swedes.
International recognition came in the year 2000, when Unesco inscribed the 'Agricultural Landscape of Southern Öland' on the World Heritage list. The award recognises not an isolated monument but the extraordinary continuity with which the island's inhabitants have farmed and lived on this difficult land for more than five thousand years, adapting to the limestone, the wind and the scarcity, and creating a human landscape unique in the world.
Contemporary Öland is, above all, a summer island. Every year, when the warm weather comes, its population of some 26,000 inhabitants multiplies several times over with the arrival of Swedish holidaymakers looking for sun, beach, nature and quiet. Öland is one of the sunniest and mildest regions in the country, and that, together with its closeness to Kalmar over the bridge, made it a much-loved holiday destination, with campsites, summer houses (sommarstugor), festivals, markets and an intense summer life.
The island has managed to combine that tourism with the protection of its enormous natural and cultural heritage. The south, with the Stora Alvaret steppe and its thousand-year-old agricultural landscape, is a World Heritage Site. The southern tip, at Ottenby, is one of the best areas in Europe for watching migratory birds. The hundreds of windmills, the stone houses, the medieval churches and the prehistoric forts are looked after as treasures. And Borgholm castle, with its summer concerts, and Solliden palace keep the connection with history and with the monarchy alive.
The island's economy mixes tourism with farming and livestock adapted to its special soil: Öland is famous for its asparagus, its potatoes, its lamb and its produce, and it has developed a highly regarded local food culture. Producers, farm cafés and seasonal restaurants are part of the appeal.
Touring Öland today means travelling through a landscape where five thousand years of history and a bright, relaxed present live side by side in plain sight: burial mounds and windmills next to beaches and campsites, the limestone steppe and the fields of flowers, the ruined castle and the royal palace, the birds and the sea. A narrow, windy island that holds, in its stony ground, one of the longest and most continuous human stories in all of Sweden.