🇸🇪 Sweden · Stockholm and Svealand
Uppsala is the city of knowledge and of Sweden's roots. Less than an hour by train from Stockholm, it is an elegant university city dominated by two silhouettes: the twin towers of its Gothic cathedral — the largest church in Scandinavia — and the pink castle watching over the city from a hill. Between them runs the Fyris river, with its bridges, its cafés at the water's edge and the bustle of thousands of students on bicycles.
A good part of Swedish history beats here. Uppsala was the great religious centre of pagan Scandinavia, with the legendary temple of old Uppsala and its enormous burial mounds of Viking kings, which still rise on the outskirts. It was also, from 1477, the seat of the country's oldest university, whose lecture halls saw figures such as the botanist Carl Linnaeus — the father of the classification of living things — and the physicist Anders Celsius, of the temperature scale.
But Uppsala is not just a museum. It is a living, young and cultured city, with one of the most intense student scenes in Sweden (its Walpurgis Night, on 30 April, is famous), good museums, botanical gardens and a relaxed, warm atmosphere. This guide covers the essentials of Uppsala with a practical eye: what to see, how to get there from Stockholm, what it costs and how to make the most of a visit to the country's intellectual cradle.
Uppsala has its roots in pagan Scandinavia: today's Gamla Uppsala ('old Uppsala'), on the outskirts, was one of the great religious and political centres of the Vikings, the seat of kings and of a famous temple dedicated to the Norse gods Odin, Thor and Freyr, recorded by the chronicler Adam of Bremen in the eleventh century, and where enormous royal burial mounds are still preserved. With Christianisation, around 1164 Uppsala became the seat of the archbishopric, the head of the Swedish Church; and in 1477 Uppsala University was founded there, the oldest in Scandinavia. During the rise of the Swedish empire it was an important intellectual and religious centre, and scholars such as Linnaeus and Celsius passed through its university. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of Sweden around Lake Mälaren: pagan Old Uppsala and its thousand-year-old university, Viking Birka, the capital founded by Birger Jarl on the islands of Gamla Stan and the vast Stockholm archipelago with its thousands of islands.
Read the history of Stockholm and Svealand →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before today's university city existed, the name Uppsala evoked the great sacred and political centre of pre-Christian Scandinavia. In what is now called Gamla Uppsala ('old Uppsala'), a few kilometres from the present centre, stood one of the most important places of worship in the Norse world, the seat of kings of the legendary Yngling dynasty and the setting for the region's great assemblies (the 'thing').
The fame of that place reached Christian Europe thanks to the German chronicler Adam of Bremen, who around 1070 described a famous pagan temple at Uppsala, covered in gold, in which a triad of Norse gods was worshipped: Odin (god of war and wisdom), Thor (god of thunder) and Freyr (god of fertility). Adam also recounted how every nine years a great sacrifice ('blót') was held there in which animals and even human beings were offered up, hanged from the trees of a sacred grove. Although historians argue over how much of his account is accurate and how much Christian exaggeration, there is no doubt that Gamla Uppsala was a religious centre of the first order.
The most impressive testimony to that period are the great royal burial mounds (Kungshögarna): three enormous earth mounds, dated to the fifth and sixth centuries, under which kings or chieftains of the region were buried after being cremated on great pyres along with their treasures. They still rise over the meadows today, next to the old medieval church built centuries later on the same sacred site, as if to Christianise it. They are the physical link with the Sweden of god-kings and sagas.
The arrival of Christianity completely transformed the meaning of Uppsala. Over the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Swedish kings gradually abandoned paganism and adopted the new faith, a slow and at times violent process. The old pagan centre of Gamla Uppsala became a Christian episcopal see, and a church was raised on the old cult site. According to tradition, King Erik IX ('Erik the Holy'), later venerated as the patron of Sweden, reigned in the twelfth century and was martyred, becoming a symbol of Christian Sweden; his relics are kept today in the cathedral.
In 1164 the archbishopric of Uppsala was created, which made the city the head of the Swedish Church, a rank it keeps to this day: the archbishop of Uppsala is the primate of the Church of Sweden. That ecclesiastical rise gave Uppsala enormous weight in the life of the kingdom, far beyond its size.
In time, the centre of the city shifted from old Uppsala towards its present site, by the Fyris river, where in the thirteenth century a great Gothic cathedral began to be built, in keeping with the importance of the see. Uppsala cathedral, of brick and with its characteristic twin towers, was raised over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and consecrated in 1435, becoming the largest church in Scandinavia and the setting for royal coronations. The medieval city that grew around it, with the archbishop's palace and the chapter houses, already had the character of a religious capital that would mark its history.
In 1477, archbishop Jakob Ulvsson, with the pope's authorisation, founded a university in Uppsala, the first in Sweden and in all Scandinavia. So was born the institution that would give the city its definitive character. In its first decades, however, the university had a difficult life and even suspended its activity during the turbulent years of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century.
Because the sixteenth century brought great upheavals to Uppsala. King Gustav Vasa, who made Sweden independent from Denmark and founded the modern monarchy, imposed the Lutheran Reformation, breaking with Rome and confiscating the Church's enormous property, which hit ecclesiastical Uppsala head on. Gustav Vasa himself ordered the building of Uppsala castle on a hill in the middle of the century, a royal fortress that dominated (and in a way challenged) the cathedral, symbol of the Church's old power. It was a very clear gesture about who was in charge in the kingdom now.
In 1593, with the Reformation now established, a decisive event took place in Uppsala: the Uppsala Synod (Uppsala möte), a church assembly that definitively fixed Lutheranism as Sweden's official religion and rejected both Catholicism and other Protestant currents. Shortly afterwards, at the end of the sixteenth century and the start of the seventeenth, the university was refounded and reorganised, especially under King Gustavus II Adolphus, who endowed it generously and gave it new buildings. Uppsala was establishing itself as the great intellectual centre of the rising Swedish empire.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the great golden age of science in Uppsala. In the setting of the Swedish empire, the university filled with scholars who left a universal mark. In the seventeenth century the Gustavianum was built, with its anatomical theatre where public dissections were carried out, and figures such as Olof Rudbeck, scientist and polymath, worked there. But it was in the eighteenth century that Uppsala gave the world some of its most famous scientists.
The most famous was Carl von Linné (Carl Linnaeus, 1707-1778), a professor at the university, who revolutionised biology by creating the modern system for classifying living things: binomial nomenclature, which gives every species a two-part Latin name (genus and species), such as 'Homo sapiens'. Linnaeus reorganised the university's botanical garden according to his method, trained disciples who travelled the world collecting plants ('the apostles of Linnaeus'), and made Uppsala the world capital of botany. His house and his garden are preserved today as a museum.
Another giant was Anders Celsius (1701-1744), an Uppsala astronomer and physicist, who devised the centigrade temperature scale that bears his name (degrees Celsius), used today in almost the whole world. In that century of the Enlightenment the city was a hive of science, with first-rate astronomers, chemists and naturalists. That inheritance is still alive: Uppsala University is today one of the most prestigious in northern Europe, and several of its researchers have won Nobel prizes. The city breathes that scientific legacy in every corner.
Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Uppsala grew and modernised, but without ever losing its double character as a religious and a university city. In the nineteenth century the great main university building (Universitetshuset) was raised and the Carolina Rediviva, the library, was enlarged, coming to hold bibliographic jewels such as the Codex Argenteus, the manuscript of the Gospels in the Gothic language written in silver and gold in the sixth century. Student life was organised around the 'nationer', the traditional regional student fraternities, which still shape the city's social life today.
The arrival of the railway and, later, the closeness of Stockholm and its airport brought Uppsala into the capital's orbit, less than an hour away by train. The city became an important centre of research and of the knowledge industry, with the university and, later, other institutions such as the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and a powerful biomedical and pharmaceutical sector. Thousands of students from across Sweden and the world still give Uppsala its young, cosmopolitan energy.
Today Uppsala is Sweden's fourth city, a prosperous and cultured place that combines, within a few kilometres, almost the whole history of the country: the Viking mounds of Gamla Uppsala, the Gothic cathedral of Christian Sweden, Gustav Vasa's castle, the Linnaeus gardens of the Enlightenment and the laboratories of contemporary science. Its famous Walpurgis Night (Valborg), every 30 April, with students throwing their caps in the air and rafting down the Fyris river, sums up that spirit of a city both ancient and perpetually young.