Sweden: Regions, Cities & Travel Guide

Three things travel with Sweden's name. First, the forest that covers more than half the country and the lakes stitched through it; then the Nobel Prize, handed out in Stockholm each December; and a pop tradition that runs from ABBA to an export industry of songwriters. Older layers sit beneath: Viking Age rune stones and the seventeenth-century empire that once ruled the Baltic.

There is also allemansrätten, the right to roam that lets anyone walk, camp, and pick berries across open country.

Sweden occupies the eastern flank of the Scandinavian Peninsula, in the southern and central reach of the Nordic north. Norway runs the length of the western and northern border; Finland lies to the east; and a maritime border with Denmark closes the south, across the narrow Öresund strait. The country is long. It falls from Arctic fell country in the far north, down through what feels like unbroken conifer forest and lake, to the flat grain plains of Skåne that read as almost continental.

Forest covers well over half the land, which is why so much of any journey here passes between trees. Water shapes the rest. The Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia hold a coastline shattered into tens of thousands of islands, skerries, and islets; the Stockholm archipelago and the granite Bohuslän coast are the most visited.

Inland sit the great lakes, Vänern and Vättern the largest, linked toward the sea by the nineteenth-century Göta Canal. Rivers such as the Klarälven and the Göta älv drain the interior. Off the south-east coast, the limestone islands of Gotland and Öland keep landscapes all their own.

In the north-west the ground lifts into the Scandinavian mountains, where Kebnekaise is the highest point in the country.

Sweden's roots reach into the Viking Age, when Norse traders and raiders from these shores pushed east along the rivers of what is now Russia and Ukraine, leaving rune stones still standing in the fields. Christianity and a single kingdom took hold over the following centuries. In 1397 the Kalmar Union bound Sweden, Denmark, and Norway under one crown, an arrangement many Swedes came to resent.

It broke when Gustav Vasa led a revolt and was crowned king in 1523, the moment usually taken as the birth of the modern state. He brought the Reformation with him. The seventeenth century turned Sweden into a great power.

Under kings such as Gustavus Adolphus, its armies fought across the Thirty Years' War and its rule reached around much of the Baltic. The empire did not last. Defeat by Russia at Poltava early in the next century began a long retreat, and Finland was lost soon after.

Sweden then entered a union with Norway in 1814, dissolved peacefully in 1905. From that settlement runs an unbroken peace: the country has stayed out of war, including both world wars, ever since. The nineteenth century also sent waves of emigrants to America before industry and the welfare state remade life at home.

Daily life leans outdoors and toward moderation. Allemansrätten, the right to roam, is more than a law; it is a habit of mind that sends people into forest and onto water without a second thought, and the word lagom, roughly 'just the right amount', captures a wider taste for the unshowy. The calendar turns on a few fixed feasts.

Midsommar gathers families round a flower-dressed pole at the lightest point of the year; in December, Lucia processions carry candlelight through the dark; late summer brings crayfish parties under paper lanterns. Swedish culture travels well. Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking is read to children worldwide, Ingmar Bergman reshaped the art of film, and a pop machinery that began with ABBA still ships songs across the globe.

Design carries the same plain, useful instinct, clean lines, pale wood, and light-filled rooms, that the wider world now reads as Scandinavian. Food is honest rather than fancy: meatballs and lingonberry, cured herring, crispbread, and the daily ritual of fika, coffee with something sweet, savoured rather than gulped. Underneath sits a society that is largely secular, broadly equal, and quietly proud of looking after its own.

Length decides everything here. The south and the coasts stay temperate and changeable, warmed by Atlantic air, carrying mild grey winters and long, light summer evenings. Inland and northward the seasons sharpen into hard, snow-locked winters and short, intense summers.

Beyond the Arctic Circle the midsummer sun never sets while the midwinter sun barely climbs, and the cold can hold for months. Rain and snow fall across the year, heaviest over the western hills.

Most visitors fly in. Stockholm Arlanda is the main international airport, with Göteborg Landvetter and Malmö handling the west and south. From the Continent, the Öresund Bridge carries road and rail straight across from Copenhagen into Skåne, so Denmark's main airport doubles as a back door to the south.

Ferries cross the Baltic to Finland, the Baltic states, Germany, and Poland. Inland, the E4 and E6 motorways and the trunk rail lines run the length of the country, north toward Lapland and the Arctic.