Where to Stay in Borås, Västra Götaland County

Borås is known as the textile city of Sweden. The looms and mills along the Viskan made it a centre of cloth and clothing trade, a heritage kept alive at Textilmuseet i Borås and in the fashion schooling the city is noted for. Art fills the streets too.

Borås konstmuseum and a celebrated open collection of public sculpture draw visitors through the centre, and the mix of textile heritage, art, and river gives this inland city its strong identity.

Caroli kyrka rises in the heart of Borås, the old town church beside the central squares. Cloth made this place. Textilmuseet i Borås tells the story of the looms and the trade, while Borås konstmuseum and the city's noted collection of public sculpture spread art through the streets.

Gustav Adolfs kyrka and the Obelisken i Borås mark the centre that grew along the Viskan. Older buildings stand in Ramnaparken. The open-air Borås museum and the wooden Ramnakyrkan gather there above the river, while the Abecita konstmuseum and the Borås Idrottsmuseum add to the city's long run of galleries and collections.

Borås was chartered as a market town in 1621. King Gustav II Adolf granted the city its rights to draw the trade of the surrounding district to a single market on the Viskan, where pedlars and weavers from the farms of the province had long carried their cloth. Fire struck more than once.

The town was rebuilt each time, the wooden streets rising again from the ashes along the same banks of the river. The textile age made the modern city. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the mills along the river spun Borås into the heart of Swedish cloth and clothing manufacture, drawing workers, trade, and wealth that shaped the streets, the squares, and the institutions of the growing place.

The mills have largely closed. Their legacy lives on in Textilmuseet i Borås, in the design schooling, and in the art and public sculpture that now carry the old textile city forward beside the Viskan.

Borås lies in the south-eastern part of Västra Götaland County, set on the Viskan river in the wooded inland country east of Göteborg in south-western Sweden. The land is a country of low forested hills, lakes, and river valley, the city gathered along the banks of the Viskan as it runs south toward the coast. Forest rings the built-up ground.

The river threads the centre together, and the woods and waters of the surrounding district close in beyond the edges of the city.

Borås has a mild but wet temperate climate, among the rainiest in the country. Winters are cool and changeable, with frequent rain and snow as weather rolls in off the Atlantic and crosses the wooded inland hills to gather over the city and its river valley. Summers are mild and green.

Long northern daylight stretches the evenings late around midsummer, the warmest season and the busiest weeks for fairs, festivals, and the public art of the centre. Heavy rainfall marks the district through the year.

Borås sits on the main road east of Göteborg, easily reached by car and bus. The motorway links the city to Göteborg and on toward Jönköping, and frequent buses run the corridor between the cities through the wooded hills. Rail serves the city too.

The nearest large airport lies between Borås and Göteborg at Landvetter, so most visitors arrive by road or by the airport a short drive away, crossing the forest country of the south-eastern county.