Where to Stay in Arlöv, Skåne County

Arlöv is known for sugar. The town grew around a great refinery on the Skåne plain, and sugar processing gave it both its work and its character through generations of industrial life just outside Malmö. The plain shaped its growth.

Standing on the flat, fertile farmland of south-western Skåne, the town sits within the orbit of the city to its south, an industrial and residential place tied closely to the larger life of Malmö and the Öresund region.

The old sugar refinery is Arlöv's defining structure, the largest landmark on this stretch of the Skåne plain. Kronetorps mölla, a tall Dutch-type windmill raised in 1841, ranks among the largest mills in Skåne. Burlövs gamla kyrka anchors the old parish.

The medieval church marks the rural roots of the district, while at Åkarp the restored mill house Möllegården serves the area as a cultural centre beside the fields. The plain dominates the rest. Flat farmland stretches around Arlöv, broken only by the railway, the roads, and the edge of Malmö to the south.

Arlöv began as a farming district on the Skåne plain. For long centuries the land here lay as rich farmland and scattered villages around the medieval parish church, part of the fertile country that fed the south and, until the seventeenth century, belonged to the Danish crown before passing to Sweden. The old church served these farms through the medieval and early modern age.

Rural, flat, and given over to grain and grazing, the country changed little for generations. Industry and the railway grew the modern town. When the line between Malmö and Lund came through in the nineteenth century, a great sugar refinery rose beside it, and Arlöv grew from a farming village into an industrial town drawing workers to the mills and the railway.

Sugar carried the town for generations. The refinery, the old church, and the nearness of Malmö tie the modern community to a history that runs from Danish farmland through industry to a busy edge of the Öresund region.

Arlöv lies in the south-western part of Skåne County, set on the flat, fertile plain just north of Malmö near the shore of the Öresund strait. Open farmland spreads around the town, broken by the railway, the motorway, and the spreading suburbs of the city to the south. The land is low and level.

The Sege å winds across the plain toward the sea, and the dense network of roads and rail that serves the Öresund region threads through the country around the town, tying it firmly to Malmö and beyond.

Arlöv has a mild temperate climate, the gentlest in Sweden. Winters are cool but rarely harsh, the nearness of the Öresund strait and the open sea beyond holding off the deep frost that grips the inland, so snow comes and goes and rain falls often through the colder months. Summers are warm and long.

The flat plain and the soft sea air give the town one of the kindest growing seasons in the country, and the long northern daylight stretches the summer evenings late. Wind sweeps the open plain.

Arlöv sits on the main railway between Malmö and Lund, among the best-connected small towns in the country. Trains call often at the station, linking the town in minutes to Malmö, Lund, and across the Öresund Bridge to Copenhagen and its airport, so reaching Arlöv without a car is easy. The motorway runs close by.

Drivers come on the dense road network of the Öresund region, and Copenhagen Airport across the strait, with Malmö's own airport to the south-east, puts the wider world within easy reach of the town.