World Heritage Sites

UNESCO established its World Heritage List in 1972. Since then about 30 additions have been made every year, adding up to 690 listings today, including such diverse sites as the obvious ones - the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal and the Chinese Wall to natural wonders like the Galapagos Islands. The 11 well-known and unknown World Heritage Sites in Sweden also reflect this diversity, ranging from the obvious - Visby, to the obscure - Engelsberg Ironworks to the natural wonders of Lapland.

VISBY
Visby is the “town of roses”, and medieval remains. Situated on the island of Gotland, right in the middle of the Baltic, but only half an hour by plane from Stockholm, it remains one of Sweden’s best kept secrets. Swedes flock to Gotland in the summer for its wonderful sandy beaches and for the weather that is always better than on the mainland.

Visby is second only to Carasonne in southern France as the best preserved medieval walled town in Europe and it has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1995. You can walk along the 3,5 kilometer long stone wall with its 44 towers and numerous gateways. Inside the town you find narrow streets, picturesque courtyards and 13th century Hanseatic warehouses up to eight stories high. Of the monasteries and 17 medieval churches, only one is intact, but the ruins of the others provide beautiful backdrops for concerts and theatre performances.

In the “Fornsalen” History Museum you can follow the fascinating history of the island and see magnificent picture stones and some of the treasures of gold and silver and Greek, Roman and Byzantine coins dug up to this day all over the island.

If you come in the beginning of August during Visby’s medieval week you can experience jesters, fire-eaters and other street performers around town and witness enactments of historic tournaments.

LAPLAND
The Arctic Circle region of northern Sweden is Europe’s last wilderness, and the home of the Saami people. It is one of the last places with a vibrant ancestral way of life based on the seasonal movement of livestock. Every summer, the Saami lead their immense herds of reindeer towards the mountains through a natural landscape well preserved until now. You can drink straight from any stream or lake and the air is clean. In spite of the northerly latitude, Lapland or the nor-thernmost part of Sweden enjoys a surprisingly mild and pleasant climate thanks to the warming effect of the Gulf Stream.

If you come to the Lapp town of Arvidsjaur during the last weekend of August you will experience a market with exceptional Saami handicrafts, traditional competitions and you can socialize with the Saamis staying in Lapp tents in the oldest preserved church town in Sweden. You will see the beautiful Saami costumes and if you are lucky you will hear the drumming of the noaidi or shamans and the yoik singing that dates back to the dawn of time.

Most tourists fly in to Kiruna to experience the midnight sun during the summer, when the sun never dips below the horizon, leaving endless hours to enjoy the natural beauty of the region and such activities as gold digging, fly fishing and white-water rafting. There are several trails in the Swedish “fjällen” - mountains for those who want to hike or climb without seeing another soul for days.

Thanks to the world-famous Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, there are now also lots of visi-tors during the winter who enjoy dog sledding, Northern Lights and sipping vodka from glasses sculpted out of ice.

HIGH COAST
20 000 years ago all of Sweden was covered by ice. The land mass was crushed under a three kilometer thick layer of ice. When this melted the landmass swung back. Nowhere else in the world did the landmass rebound as much as at the High Coast of the southern Gulf of Bothnia where some flat hills rise to a height of 350 meters. The irregular topo-graphy of this beautiful region, with many inlets and lakes, that is now more easily accessible thanks to the new Höga Kusten bridge, was shaped by an isostatic uplift (the combined processes of glacia-tion, glacial retreat and the emergence of new land from the sea). The 142,500 hectare site area that includes an 80,000 hectare marine component is the “type area” for re-search on isostasy, the phenomenon having first been recognized and studied here. In fact, it still goes on raising the High Coast at a rate of 0.9 meters per century.

SKOGSKYRKOGÅRDEN
The Skogskyrkogården cemetery in Stockholm (in the suburb of Enskede) was built between 1917 and 1920 by the two young architects, Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, in a former gravel quarry overgrown with pine trees. The design, which combines plant materials and architectural features with irregularities of the ground and its landscape, is in perfect harmony with its function. The functionalistic Uppståndelsekapellet chapel is the only building that has not been subordinated to nature. The Woodland Cemetery is one of very few examples of 20th century architecture on the World Heritage List, having had a profound influence on architecture in many countries of the world. What strikes you as a visitor is really the absence of graves, that are hidden away among the pine trees leaving large open sweeping fields with only a single large cross and a few simple chapels. Even the grave of Greta Garbo is hidden away.

DROTTNINGHOLM
The royal family moved out to Drottningholm Palace, in the outskirts of Stockholm, in 1982 to provide a more private and less polluted environment for the children than that at the Stockholm Palace. Parts of the palace and the surrounding French baroque park with influences of the picturesque English garden style are open to the public (08-4026280). The Royal Domain of Drottningholm is a miniature Versailles, created by Nicodemus Tessin the Elder for Queen Hedvig Eleonora. Construction of this beauty started in 1662. Inside you can see the queen’s impressive state bed chamber in blue and gold and the exquisite rococo style library of Queen Lovisa Ulrica, that has often been called “Sweden’s most beautiful room”. In the park you find the cute Kina Slott or Chinese Pavilion that was a surprise birthday gift to Queen Lovisa Ulrika in 1753. One of the nicest ways to experience Drottningholm is to take in an opera at the Palace Theatre (from end of May to early September with hard to get tickets from 077-1707070) where everything including the stage machinery is from King Gustav III’s time. After the King was assassinated, the theatre was forgotten and not rediscovered until 1921.

BIRKA
The Viking town of Birka on the lush island of Björkö was a major port in Lake Mälaren 1 200 years ago. It was also Sweden’s first real town and it was here the first Christian congregation was founded by Saint Ansgar in 831.
Birka and the “royal” Hovgården on the neighbouring island of Adelsö are the sites of extensive archaeological excavations that illustrate the elaborate trading net-works of Viking Age Europe, and their influence on the subsequent history of Scandinavia. The new museum has a beautiful scale reconstruction of Birka in the 860s, that highlights some of the remarkable finds that have been dug up here. You will see Birka’s own coins pens, combs, pearls and tools as well as silk from China, glass from France and Arabic coins that once belonged to the crafts people, traders, farmers and slaves on the island.
The best way to get to Birka is to take a leisurely boat trip (1 1/2 hours long) from the Stockholm City Hall and enjoy an ångbåtsbiff steak in the charming restaurant on board on the way back.

TANUM
The rock carvings in and around Tanum, in the north of Bohuslän, represent a unique artistic achievement as evident in the rich and varied motifs. Here you see lively depictions of humans, animals, ships, weapons and other objects, some of which are a mys-tery to this day. The abundance of carvings in Tanum and nearby Fossum, Vitlycke and Litsleby give us an idea of the life and beliefs of the people living in the Bronze Age in Europe. New discoveries of carvings are made all the time in this area but are kept secret until they have been studied. Just as with runestones, there are no big signs or tourist operations marking the carv-ings. After your exploration you can drive over to the Tanums Gestgiveri inn (phone 05 25 20 10) for a delightful gourmet meal in a building dating back to 1663.

GAMMELSTAD
Luleå’s Gammelstad, at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, is the best preserved example of a unique kind of town found in northern Scandinavia, the church town. Its 424 wooden houses crowded around the early 15th century stone church were used only on Sundays and during religious festi-vals when worshippers from the surrounding countryside stayed overnight because they could not return home the same day.

The first buildings were stables, built close to the church so that the horses were kept warm during the winter while the farmers attended the obligatory church service. After a while some of the stables were utilized for overnight stays and in the 17th century they evolved into cottages where farmers sometimes stayed during the entire Christmas period. Eventually the church town concept became so popular that from 1817 the cottages were only allowed for people who lived more than ten kilometers from church. The more secular Sweden became the less the houses in the church villages were used. In recent years they have once again gained in popularity, this time with tourists (Ph.: 920-940 70).

KARLSKRONA
The historic naval port of Karlskrona received well-deserved international recognition when it became a World Heritage Site in 1998. The naval base was founded in 1680 by King Karl XI at a time when Sweden ruled over Finland, Estonia, Latvia and parts of northern Germany. The base was planned by Erik Dahlberg together with the foremost experts of the time. The round protected port (that you can see on the cover) with its workshops soon became the country’s largest work site. Thanks to the fact that Sweden has not been in a war since 1809, it is uniquely preserved.

Karlskrona, with its many beautiful Gustavian buildings and one of northern Europe’s largest squares has been described as a Stock-holm in miniature, skillfully built as it is on an attractive archipelago (where a Soviet submarine ran aground in 1981) and really worth a visit.

ENGELSBERG
Much of Sweden’s early wealth emanates from iron.

Ore discoveries were marked on maps with a burning mountain, just like the Västmanland landscape crest. Iron production at Engelsberg goes back to the Middle Ages, when mine-owning farmers achieved efficiency in the use of the natural riches of the Bergslagen area. It was in the eighteenth century that the Engelsberg Ironworks, ultra-modern for its time, came to be ranked among the most important ironworks in Sweden and Europe. Engelsberg eventually consisted of about fifty different buildings. Besides the log-insulated smelting house and the hammer forge, there is also a weighing house where the charcoal and ore were weighed. A water-wheel driving the iron ore crusher that is still working, can be seen on the stamp on the front cover. The day workers’ building, or the “inn” as it was called, worked like a center where workers could buy spirits and find accommodation. In 1917 a Lancashire forge with a rolling mill was built. You will also see the owner’s mansion with its surrounding park (when it is open to the public during the summer).

ÖLAND
The southern part of the narrow island of Öland in the Baltic Sea is dominated by a vast limestone pavement. This is the famous “alvaret” steppe-like land-scape and part of the agricultural area that UNESCO listed as a World Heritage Site in 2000. At Stora Alvaret the tree-less landscape experiences rough snow storms during the winter, water submersion during the spring followed by a succession of stupen-dous blooming.