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Stockholm
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STOCKHOLM
comes lauded as Sweden's most beautiful city, and apart from some sad central squares of concrete developments and a tangled road junction or two, it lives up to it - it's delightful, not least as a contrast to the apparently endless lakes and forests of the rest of the country. It's also a remarkably disparate capital, one whose tracts of water and range of monumental buildings give it an ageing, lived-in feel and an atmosphere quite at odds with its status as Sweden's most contemporary, forward-looking city.
Built on fourteen small islands, Stockholm was a natural site for the fortifications, erected by one Birger Jarl in 1255, that grew into the current city. In the sixteenth century, the city fell to King Gustav Vasa, a century later becoming the centre of the Swedish trading empire that covered present-day Scandinavia. Following the waning of Swedish power it entered something of a quiet period, only rising to prominence again in the nineteenth century when industrialization sowed the seeds of the Swedish economic miracle Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Sweden,
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