Where to Stay in Visby, Gotland County

Visby is among the best-preserved walled towns in northern Europe, ringed by the Visby ringmur and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Roses climb the ruins. The wall runs for kilometres, studded with squat saddle-roof towers such as Kruttornet and the slim Jungfrutornet.

Within it stand the roofless church ruins left from the Hanseatic boom, when Gotland traders carried goods across the Baltic and built in stone.

The Visby ringmur is studded with dozens of towers and turrets, many with their own names, Silverhättan, Långa Lisa, the squat Kvarntornet. Kruttornet, beside the harbour, is the oldest building still standing. The roofless ruins of Solberga kloster and Ryska kyrkan mark religious houses left empty long ago, while only fragments remain of Visborg, the castle that once guarded the town's southern corner.

Gotlands konstmuseum shows island art. Outside the gates, the Stenkorset på Korsbetningen marks the dead of 1361.

Visby grew up as a harbour on the Baltic trade routes, and by the 12th and 13th centuries it ranked among the leading ports of the Hanseatic League. German and Gotlandic merchants grew rich here. Their money raised stone churches and warehouses, and in the 13th and 14th centuries it paid for the ring wall, which guarded the town from the sea and, just as pointedly, from the farmers of the Gotland countryside who resented its trade monopoly.

The town's fortunes turned in 1361. A Danish army under Valdemar Atterdag landed on Gotland and cut down the island's yeomen outside the gates at the Battle of Visby. The dead were buried in mass graves where the Stenkorset på Korsbetningen still stands.

Decline followed the conquest. Pirates worked the surrounding waters, and around 1411 Erik of Pomerania built the castle of Visborg as a stronghold above the harbour. The churches were later stripped and abandoned, leaving the roofless ruins that mark the skyline.

Gotland passed to Sweden in 1645, Visborg was blown up in 1679, and the shrunken town drifted for two centuries before its preserved medieval core drew travellers and, in 1995, a place on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Visby lies on the west coast of Gotland, the large limestone island that sits in the Baltic off south-eastern Sweden. It occupies the north-western part of Gotland County and serves as the county seat. The town climbs from a working harbour up a low limestone escarpment, the klint, so its streets rise in terraces toward the inland plateau.

Thin soil covers bare rock. Open sea, not a mainland shore, lies on every side of Gotland.

The open sea sets the rhythm. Gotland's position in the middle of the Baltic gives Visby a mild maritime climate, where the water warms slowly through spring and holds its heat long into autumn. Summers stay temperate rather than hot, cooled by breezes off the water.

Winters are milder and less snowy than inland Sweden, though raw winds cross the exposed coast. The island sits among the sunnier, drier corners of the country, in the lee of the Scandinavian rains.

Every trip to Visby crosses open water. Car ferries run to the town's harbour from two mainland ports, Nynäshamn south of Stockholm and Oskarshamn on the Småland coast, carrying vehicles, freight, and foot passengers across the Baltic. Visby Airport, just north of the town, links the island to Stockholm and other Swedish cities by short flights.

On Gotland itself, the main roads fan out from Visby to the rest of the island, and island buses use the terminal by the eastern gates. Inside the ring wall, the lanes are largely closed to traffic, so most arrivals continue on foot.