Stockholm County, Sweden — Towns & Travel Guide

The county's reputation rests on water. Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, sits at its centre, where Lake Mälaren empties into the Baltic Sea through the old town's locks and channels. Beyond the quays the Stockholm Archipelago scatters seaward in a thinning chain of islands, skerries, and bare rock.

Inland, the farmland of Uppland carries an unusually dense concentration of Viking-age runestones, and the royal palace at Drottningholm stands on its own island in the lake.

Stockholm County occupies the Baltic coast of east-central Sweden, at the seam where the great lake of Mälaren drains into the Baltic Sea. Water defines it. Out beyond the capital the mainland breaks apart into more than 30,000 islands, skerries, and islets, the Stockholm Archipelago thinning from wooded shores to bare rock as it runs seaward.

The bedrock underneath is ancient and low, planed smooth by ice-age glaciers that left rounded hills and shallow basins across the region. Mälaren itself is one of Sweden's largest lakes, a freshwater expanse held just above the level of the Baltic, so its outflow tumbles through the locks and channels of the old town. The land is still rising.

Since the last ice age the whole region has lifted slowly out of the sea, turning old seabed into dry meadow and nudging the shoreline outward over the centuries. Inland, north and west of the city, the ground softens into the farmland of Uppland, a patchwork of low ridges, clay plains, and mixed pine and birch forest. Drottningholm Palace stands on its own island in the lake.

The climate stays cool and damp, tempered by all that surrounding water, with long grey winters and short bright summers.

Few parts of Sweden wear their early-medieval past as plainly as this one. Uppland and its coastal Roslagen are thick with runestones, granite slabs cut with looping serpents and memorial verse a thousand years ago, and the farmland around the Bro district holds one of the densest groupings in the country. The same inland keeps its old stone churches, among them Håbo-Tibble kyrka and Västra Ryds kyrka, and the broken walls of Almare-Stäkets borg, a medieval castle that once guarded the water route toward Uppsala.

Stone, water, and field repeat across it. The living culture leans on the sea. Through the short northern summer, families decamp to red-painted cottages on the islands, and the water fills with small boats, swimmers, and the smell of pickled herring and new potatoes.

Roslagen keeps a salt-cured fishing tradition that still divides outsiders at the table. Closer to the city, the court theatre at Drottningholm has staged opera in its original eighteenth-century machinery since the Gustavian age, and Stockholm gathers the county's museums, concert halls, and the Nobel Prize ceremonies. High art and herring share the same shore.

As an administrative county, Stockholms län took shape in the early eighteenth century, when Sweden reorganised its provinces into the län system that still frames the country's local government. The ground it covers is far older. Stockholm itself was founded around the middle of the thirteenth century to control the lock between Mälaren and the sea, and grew into the seat of Swedish royal and political power.

The län drew its modern outline from the historic provinces of Uppland and Södermanland, binding capital, coast, and farmland under one administration.

Stockholm County sits in the humid continental band of the Baltic coast, with a maritime softening from all the surrounding water. Winters are cold and dark, the inner bays and Mälaren often freezing over, while the open archipelago stays a little milder than the inland forests. Summers are mild and long-lit, the white nights of midsummer pulling people onto the water.

Spring comes late and short; autumn turns grey and wet off the sea. The water blunts the sharpest extremes.

Most international flights land at Stockholm Arlanda Airport, north of the city. A smaller airport nearer the centre handles domestic routes. By land, trunk motorways funnel traffic in from the south and west, and long-distance trains converge on the capital's central station.

Within the county, the metro, commuter rail, and buses reach across the suburbs, while scheduled boats fan out from the city quays to the archipelago. Ferries cross the Baltic to Finland too.