Where to Stay in Lidingö, Stockholm County

Lidingö is known above all for green calm within reach of the city. The sculptor Carl Milles built his home and garden here, the place that became the museum of Millesgården, where bronze figures stand against the open water toward Stockholm. Bronze and water define it.

The island also lends its name to Lidingöloppet, among the largest cross-country running races anywhere, held each autumn through its forests, and its large houses and sought-after shoreline give it a settled, well-off character distinct from the busier suburbs across the bridge.

Millesgården is the one fixed point on any visit, the cliff-top house and sculpture terraces left by Carl Milles and his wife. Elsewhere it is residential, not monumental. The old Lidingö kyrka stands near the southern shore, Ansgarskyrkan serves a newer parish, and grand early-century villas such as Villa Foresta recall the era when the island filled with summer and suburban houses.

Athletics and football are played at Lidingövallen.

For most of its history Lidingö was farmland and woodland on a Baltic island, worked by tenants and reached only by boat. That isolation ended slowly. As Stockholm grew in the nineteenth century, the wealthy began building summer houses along its shores, and ferries and then bridges drew the island into the orbit of the expanding capital.

The turn of the twentieth century fixed its character. Villa districts spread, a railway crossed the island, and Lidingö was granted town rights in the 1920s. Carl Milles created his garden of sculpture on a southern cliff in these same decades, a legacy that would outlast him as the museum of Millesgården.

Through the postwar years apartment areas were added around the centre, yet the island kept its wooded shoreline and its reputation as a green, comfortable place to live. It remains a municipality in its own right, joined to the mainland by bridge and light rail rather than swallowed by the city it faces.

Lidingö occupies the eastern part of Stockholm County, an island in the inner archipelago just off the city's north-eastern districts. The narrow strait of Lilla Värtan separates it from the mainland at Ropsten, where the bridge and light rail cross. The island is hilly and wooded.

Inlets and rocky shores fold around its edges, and beyond it to the east the archipelago opens out toward the open Baltic in a scatter of larger and smaller islands.

Water on every side shapes the weather here. Lidingö's climate is humid continental but maritime in temper, with the strait and the archipelago smoothing the extremes. Winters are cold yet often damp rather than deeply frozen, and ice forms on the sheltered inlets before the open water.

Summers are gentle. Long light evenings and cooling breezes off the Baltic make the wooded shore pleasant through the warm months, ahead of wet and gusty autumns.

Lidingö connects to Stockholm at a single point. The Lidingöbron carries road traffic and the Lidingöbanan light-rail line across the strait to Ropsten, where the metro's red line takes over toward the centre. That makes the crossing quick.

Buses fan out across the island from there, and drivers reach it from the Norra länken road tunnels, while the inner-archipelago boats call at its piers in the warmer season.