Where to Stay in Stockholm, Stockholm County

Few capitals wear their geography so plainly. The old town of Gamla Stan sits on an island of ochre façades and narrow lanes laid down in the medieval city, while the water around it carries ferries out toward an archipelago of some 24,000 islands, islets, and skerries. Stockholm hosts the Nobel Prize ceremony each December, and its museums run into the scores.

Water decides almost everything here.

Gamla Stan is compact. On its largest island stand the Royal Palace and Storkyrkan, the cathedral where Swedish monarchs were crowned, while a short ferry crosses to Djurgården. That island holds the Vasa Museum, built around a salvaged 17th-century warship, and Skansen, the open-air museum founded in 1891.

To the west, the brick tower of Stockholm City Hall marks where the Nobel banquet is held each December.

Stockholm was founded as a city in 1252, by tradition under the statesman Birger Jarl, on the small island now called Gamla Stan that guarded the passage between Lake Mälaren and the Baltic. People had lived around these shores far earlier, with traces of settlement reaching back to the Stone Age, but it was the lock-like narrows here, controlling trade between lake and sea, that made a town worth raising. Iron, salt, and grain passed through.

The German merchants of the Hanseatic League settled early, and their church still stands above the lanes. From that first island the city spread onto the surrounding shores and heights, north to the ridge of Norrmalm and south onto the cliffs of Södermalm. It became the seat of Swedish kings, then the capital of a Baltic empire, and later the county seat of Stockholm County.

Royal palaces, naval yards, and grand civic halls record each phase in stone. Birger Jarl is still its founder.

Stockholm lies on Sweden's east coast, in the southern part of Stockholm County, at the point where Lake Mälaren drains into the brackish Baltic. The inner city spreads across fourteen islands, threaded by bridges and three short straits, and roughly a third of the municipal area is water while another third is green. East of the centre the land breaks apart into the archipelago.

The city is the county seat. Water sets the rhythm.

The city has a humid continental climate, tempered by the water that wraps around it. Winters are long and cold, with snow over the islands and the narrows sometimes freezing, while summers stay mild and bright, the daylight stretching far into the evening. Spring comes slowly.

Autumn brings grey skies and steady rain off the Baltic.

Most international arrivals land at Stockholm Arlanda Airport to the north, linked to the centre by the Arlanda Express rail line and by motorway. Long-distance trains converge on Stockholm Centralstation, where the national network meets the metro, the Tunnelbana, whose lines fan out beneath the city. The E4 motorway runs through from north to south.

Ferries cross the Baltic to Finland and out to the islands. Boats still matter here.