Where to Stay in Solna, Stockholm County

Solna is where the capital keeps its grandest park and some of its biggest crowds. The English-style grounds of Hagaparken sweep along the water of Brunnsviken, dotted with royal pavilions and a glass butterfly house, Fjärilshuset, while a short way off the national football arena fills on match days. The Karolinska medical campus gives the town a research weight out of proportion to its size.

It is small but consequential.

The round, whitewashed Solna kyrka is one of the oldest churches in the region, its core medieval and its walls once built to double as a refuge. Out in Hagaparken the royal pavilions stand among the trees, and Fjärilshuset shelters live butterflies and birds under glass through the Nordic winter. The Olle Olsson Hagalund-museet preserves a painter's view of a vanished wooden suburb.

Small wonders sit close together.

Solna grew up around its church. Solna kyrka, a round stone church on a rise above Brunnsviken, dates from the twelfth century and gave the surrounding parish the name it still carries. For generations the land between the bays was farmland and royal hunting ground on the northern road out of Stockholm.

In the late eighteenth century Gustav III reshaped the shore of Brunnsviken into Hagaparken, an English-style landscape garden whose copper tents and pavilion survive among the lawns. Haga Palace stands close by. Further north, on the calm water of Edsviken, sits the older Ulriksdals slott.

Modern Solna took shape around medicine and sport. Karolinska Institutet, the medical university whose assembly awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, built its main campus here beside the teaching hospital that carries the same name. Råsunda stadium once stood at the centre of Swedish football.

It hosted the 1958 World Cup final, then gave way to Friends Arena, the national stadium raised on the same ground. Solna was granted city status in 1948. Much of its shoreline lies within Kungliga nationalstadsparken, the protected royal park, so woods and bays open out only a short walk from the arena crowds and the laboratory benches.

Solna sits in the central part of Stockholm County, on the south-eastern side of the country, immediately north of the capital and almost surrounded by it. Water frames much of the town, with the bay of Brunnsviken to the east and the lake-arm of Ulvsundasjön to the west, and low wooded ridges run between them. The little stream of Igelbäcken threads the northern fields.

The land is gentle and built-up. Greenery survives in patches.

Solna shares the humid continental climate of the wider Stockholm area, its edges softened by all the surrounding water. Winters are cold and often grey, with snow that comes and goes and short, low afternoons, while summers turn mild and green, the long northern evenings keeping the parks busy late. Spring is brief.

Autumn settles in damp and quiet over the lakes.

Solna is woven tightly into the capital's transport. The Tunnelbana reaches Solna Centrum, commuter trains call at the town's stations, and the Tvärbanan light-rail line loops across to neighbouring suburbs. The E4 and E18 motorways run along its edges, carrying traffic north toward Arlanda and Uppsala.

Buses fill in the gaps between. It is an easy place to reach.