Sweden is the largest of the Scandinavian countries, and its scale shows: a thousand-kilometre run from the mild beaches of the south to the polar tundra of the far north, with roughly 100,000 lakes and endless forest in between. It's an expensive country to visit — a beer runs about $9 — but the trade-off is space, quiet, and scenery that rarely repeats itself from one region to the next.
The south is farmland, manors, and sandy beaches — a gentler landscape than most people picture when they think of Sweden. Malmö, cosmopolitan and outward-looking thanks to its bridge link across the Öresund to Copenhagen, anchors this end of the country, with the university town of Lund close by. Gothenburg, on the west coast, is the country's working port city and gateway to the granite skerries of the Bohuslän coast.
Stockholm, built across fourteen islands where Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic archipelago, is the capital and the obvious centrepiece — beautiful, historic, and increasingly high-tech. Around it sit the old pre-capital towns of Uppsala and Sigtuna, and the Göta Canal, nicknamed the Blue Ribbon of Sweden, still carries slow steamship cruises between here and Gothenburg through a chain of lakes and locks.
Move north and the coast turns to a scatter of small granite islands, the water gives way gradually to forest, and the forest thickens the further you go. Gotland and Öland sit out in the Baltic, each with its own character. Inland, Dalarna is the province Swedes themselves consider the most quintessentially Swedish — red timber farmhouses, folk costumes, and Lake Siljan. Further north still, the rivers grow bigger, the towns grow sparser, and the mountains along the Norwegian border rise higher, until Swedish Lapland gives way to open tundra above the Arctic Circle.
Sweden's wealth was built on iron ore, forestry, and cheap hydroelectric power; today it runs just as much on design and technology, and that combination — resource-rich, design-conscious, quietly confident — is what gives the country its particular texture.
