5 Days in Stockholm

Start in the square at the top of the island, the oldest in Stockholm, with the tall red and yellow gabled merchants' houses that are on every postcard. It looks peaceful, but in November 1520 it was the scene of the Stockholm Bloodbath. The Danish king Christian II, who had just been crowned king of Sweden, invited the Swedish nobility to a feast in the castle and then had more than 80 of them, nobles and clergy, executed here. One of the victims' sons, Gustav Vasa, raised a rebellion, drove the Danes out and was elected king of Sweden in 1523. It was the end of the union with Denmark and the beginning of modern Sweden.

From the square, wander down Västerlånggatan and Österlånggatan, the two main lanes, and look for Mårten Trotzigs gränd, the narrowest alley in town, about 90 cm at its tightest.

The long building on the north side of Stortorget is the Stock Exchange from 1778, home of the Swedish Academy, which picks the Nobel Prize in Literature, and of the Nobel Prize Museum. Alfred Nobel, the Stockholm-born inventor of dynamite, left most of his fortune to the prizes in 1895, and the museum tells the stories of the laureates through their objects. In the bistro, look under the chairs: visiting laureates have signed them.

Round the corner is Storkyrkan, Stockholm's cathedral, where Swedish kings were crowned and where Crown Princess Victoria married in 2010. Inside, two things are worth the ticket. The wooden statue of St George slaying the dragon, carved by Bernt Notke and unveiled in 1489, is one of the great medieval sculptures in Northern Europe, made to celebrate the Swedish victory over the Danes at Brunkeberg in 1471. And the Vädersolstavlan, the Sun Dog painting, shows a strange halo of suns seen over the city in 1535. It's the oldest picture of Stockholm, in a copy from the 1630s.

The Royal Palace stands where the medieval castle of Tre Kronor burned down in 1697. The architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger built this huge Baroque block in its place, and it took until 1754 to finish. The king and queen don't live here, they live at Drottningholm (day five), but it's their official residence and office, and with more than 600 rooms it's one of the largest palaces in Europe still in use.

Watch the changing of the guard in the outer courtyard, with a military band in summer, then go inside: the state apartments, the Treasury with the crown regalia, and the Tre Kronor Museum in the cellars, where you can see the walls of the old castle.

In the palace cellars is Livrustkammaren, the Royal Armoury, Sweden's oldest museum. It's full of coronation coaches, armor and royal clothes, but two exhibits stay with you. One is Streiff, the stuffed horse that Gustav II Adolf rode at the Battle of Lützen in 1632, where the king was killed. The other is the costume Gustav III wore to a masked ball at the Opera on 16 March 1792, when an aristocrat shot him in the back. He died two weeks later, and the story inspired Verdi's opera A Masked Ball.

Time for fika, the Swedish coffee break. Offices stop for it, friends meet over it, and "shall we fika?" is the standard Swedish invitation. Order a filter coffee, which often comes with a free refill (påtår), and a kanelbulle, a cinnamon bun with cardamom in the dough and pearl sugar on top. Chokladkoppen and Kaffekoppen, side by side on Stortorget, are the classics, with terraces in summer and vaulted cellars for the cold months. Make it a late lunch if you like: open sandwiches and soups are on every café menu.

Walk across to Riddarholmen, the little island west of Gamla stan, past the openwork iron spire of Riddarholm Church, where almost every Swedish king from Gustav II Adolf to Gustaf V, who died in 1950, is buried. At the western edge of the island is a terrace named after Evert Taube, the troubadour whose songs every Swede knows, with his statue strumming a lute. Sit on the wall and watch the sun go down over Lake Mälaren behind City Hall.

Finish back in Gamla stan at Den Gyldene Freden, "The Golden Peace", which has been serving in the same building since 1722 and is one of the oldest restaurants in the world still on its original site. The Swedish Academy owns the building and holds its weekly Thursday dinner in a private room upstairs. The poet and songwriter Carl Michael Bellman drank here in the 1700s. Order the Swedish classics: herring, köttbullar with lingonberries, or a Wallenbergare, the veal burger with mashed potatoes and peas.

On 10 August 1628 the warship Vasa, the pride of King Gustav II Adolf's navy, set sail from the quay below the Royal Palace, heeled over in a gust of wind and sank in the harbor after barely 1,300 meters, in front of a crowd that had come to see her off. She was too narrow and too top-heavy for her two decks of cannon. For 333 years she lay in the mud of the harbor, where the cold, brackish water kept the shipworms away. In 1956 an amateur researcher, Anders Franzén, found her, and on 24 April 1961 she was raised to the surface almost whole.

The Vasa Museum was built around her, and the first sight of the ship in the dark hall, 69 meters long and about 98% original, is one of the great museum moments in Europe. Walk round her on every level, look at the hundreds of carved figures meant to frighten enemies, and don't miss the faces reconstructed from the skeletons of the people who drowned. Next door, the Nordiska museet, in a building that looks like a Renaissance palace, tells the story of everyday Swedish life.

Up the hill is Skansen, the world's first open-air museum. Artur Hazelius opened it in 1891, worried that industrialization was wiping out the old Swedish ways of life, and moved farmhouses, manors, churches and workshops here from all over the country, nearly 200 of them today. In the old town quarter, people in period dress bake, blow glass and work the printing press. There's also a zoo of Nordic animals, with brown bears, moose, wolves, lynx and seals.

It's where Stockholm celebrates its holidays, too: Midsummer around the maypole, the Christmas market on Advent weekends, Lucia in December and the New Year's Eve countdown on TV.

Walk 15 minutes east through the park to Rosendals trädgård, an organic garden with greenhouses, orchards and a café in the glasshouse. Lunch is soup, salads and sandwiches, and everything is baked on site, much of it with what grows around you. Sit at a table under the apple trees with a bun and a coffee and you'll understand why locals cycle out here on Sundays.

Walk back west to ABBA The Museum, between Skansen and the water. Even if you think you don't care, it's a lot of fun. The costumes, the gold records and the story of the Eurovision win in 1974 with Waterloo are all there, but the point is the interactive part: you sing and dance on stage with holograms of the band and record your own version of a song. It explains a lot about how a country of ten million became one of the great exporters of pop music, from ABBA and Roxette to Max Martin's hits.

Take the little Djurgården ferry (line 82) from Allmänna gränd back across the harbor to Slussen. It's a normal public transport ticket and the cheapest sightseeing cruise in town, with the palace and Gamla stan sliding past.

A short walk along the quay is Fotografiska, a museum of photography in a brick customs house from 1906. The exhibitions change every few months and are usually excellent, it's open until 11pm every day, and the café on the top floor has one of the best views of the city across the water.

Stockholm City Hall stands on the water at the tip of Kungsholmen, a dark red brick palace by Ragnar Östberg, finished in 1923 from about eight million bricks, with the three gold crowns of Sweden at the top of its 106-meter tower. It's the masterpiece of the Swedish National Romantic style, and it's still a working town hall.

On the tour you see the Blue Hall, which isn't blue (Östberg liked the red brick too much to paint it), where the Nobel banquet for 1,300 guests is held every 10 December. Upstairs is the Golden Hall, covered in more than 18 million gold mosaic pieces, with the Queen of Lake Mälaren on the end wall.

Stockholm's metro has been called the world's longest art gallery: about 90 of its 100 stations have been decorated by artists since the 1950s, many of them carved straight out of the rock and left rough like caves. Walk to T-Centralen, where the blue platform of the blue line is painted with leaves and vines, then ride a few stops. Kungsträdgården has a garden of statues and fragments of old palaces in red, white and green. Stadion, on the red line, is a cave painted sky blue with a rainbow, a nod to the 1912 Olympics held at the stadium above.

Get off the metro at Östermalmstorg for Östermalms saluhall, a red brick market hall from 1888 with a soaring iron roof, reopened in 2020 after renovation. It's the place for Swedish fish and the classic starters. Order gravlax, salmon cured with salt, sugar and dill and served with a sweet mustard sauce, or toast Skagen, shrimp in mayonnaise and dill piled on fried bread with a spoon of roe, invented by the Stockholm restaurateur Tore Wretman in 1958. Lisa Elmqvist is the classic counter for both.

Ten minutes east, the Swedish History Museum, Historiska, is where to meet the Vikings. Its exhibition The Viking World is one of the largest anywhere, with swords, silver hoards, runestones and the stories of the people who traded as far as Baghdad and raided as far as England. Downstairs, the Gold Room is a vault full of gold from the Bronze Age to the Middle Ages, including collars and a reliquary studded with jewels.

Walk back west along Strandvägen, the waterfront boulevard begun in the 1860s and finished in time for the 1897 Stockholm Exhibition, lined with the palatial apartment blocks of the rich and old wooden boats moored along the quay. Svenskt Tenn, the shop where Josef Frank's printed fabrics have defined Swedish style since the 1930s, is on the way.

At the end, cross the little bridge to Skeppsholmen, an island of naval buildings and museums. Moderna Museet has one of Europe's best modern art collections, from Picasso and Duchamp to Niki de Saint Phalle's colorful sculptures in the garden, and ArkDes next door, the Swedish center for architecture and design, is free.

Back across the bridge, the Nationalmuseum is Sweden's museum of art and design, in a palace on the water at Blasieholmen, reopened in 2018 after a long renovation. On Thursday evenings it's open until 8pm and free. Look for the Rembrandts, Carl Larsson's paintings of Swedish home life, which shaped how the world imagines a Swedish house, and his giant, much fought-over Midvinterblot on the staircase. Upstairs, the design collection runs from Baroque silver to IKEA.

Östermalm is Stockholm's smartest district, and its restaurants are where the old Swedish classics are cooked best. Sturehof, a brasserie on Stureplan since 1897, does fish and shellfish and the best toast Skagen in town. Later, the clubs around Stureplan open their doors, with strict bouncers, dress codes and age limits of 20 to 25, even though the legal drinking age in bars is 18.

Uppsala Cathedral is the tallest church in Scandinavia, with twin spires 118.7 meters high, built of brick in the French Gothic style from the 1270s on. It's the seat of the Archbishop of Sweden, and Swedish kings were crowned here for centuries. Inside are the tombs of Gustav Vasa, the king you met on Stortorget, and of Carl Linnaeus, the botanist who gave the world its system for naming plants and animals.

Next door, the Gustavianum, the old university building from the 1620s, has a dome-topped anatomical theater where students once watched dissections. Uppsala University was founded in 1477, and it's the oldest in the Nordic countries. Up the street, its library, Carolina Rediviva, has a free exhibition hall with the Silver Bible, a 6th-century Gothic gospel book written in silver ink on purple parchment, and the Carta Marina, the first detailed map of the Nordic countries.

Climb the hill to the pink Uppsala Castle, begun by Gustav Vasa in the 1540s, for the view over the town and the cathedral. On the way down, the Linnaeus Garden, Sweden's oldest botanical garden, is laid out again as Linnaeus planted it in the 1740s, according to his own system, with the house where he lived next door.

The Fyris river runs through the center past cafés and student pubs. Uppsala is a student city, with thirteen student nations, clubs named after the regions students came from, and some of their pubs and lunch places are open to visitors. For a classic Swedish lunch, look for dagens lunch, the set meal of the day with salad, bread and coffee.

After lunch, take bus 2 north for about 15 minutes to Gamla Uppsala, Old Uppsala, the center of pagan Sweden. Three huge grass-covered royal burial mounds from the 500s rise out of the fields, and legend makes them the graves of kings from the sagas. The 11th-century German chronicler Adam of Bremen described a great pagan temple here with sacrifices of men and animals, though archaeologists still argue about what stood where. The small museum tells the story well, and the medieval church beside the mounds was the first cathedral, before the archbishop moved to the new town.

Drottningholm Palace, "Queen's Island", was built from 1662 for the dowager queen Hedvig Eleonora, again by the Tessins, father and son, in the French style, which is why it's often called Sweden's Versailles. Since 1981 it's been the home of the royal family, who live in the southern wing, while the rest is open to visitors. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with its gardens, its Chinese Pavilion and the Drottningholm Palace Theatre, finished in 1766. The theater is one of the best-preserved of its time in the world, still with its original wooden stage machinery for waves, clouds and thunder, and it still puts on operas in summer.

Walk the formal Baroque garden down to the water and the English park behind it.

Back in town, get off the metro at Slussen and climb to Monteliusvägen, a 500-meter path along the top of the cliffs of Södermalm. It's the classic view of Stockholm: City Hall, Riddarholmen and Gamla stan across the water of Riddarfjärden. A little further west, the rocks of Skinnarviksberget, the highest natural point in the inner city, are where locals sit with a drink on summer evenings.

Södermalm, Söder to locals, was the working-class island, and it's now the city's creative and bar district. Walk east along Hornsgatan and Götgatan into SoFo, the streets "south of Folkungagatan", with vintage shops, Swedish fashion labels and cafés around the square of Nytorget. Further east, Fjällgatan has 18th-century wooden houses and another fine view over the harbor. Stop at Drop Coffee or any café on the way.

For the last dinner, go to Pelikan, a beer hall on Blekingegatan with dark wood paneling, high ceilings and waiters in white jackets, serving traditional Swedish food since 1904. This is the place for köttbullar, real Swedish meatballs: small, soft, in a cream gravy with mashed potatoes, lingonberries and pickled cucumber. The other classics are pytt i panna, fried diced potato and meat with a fried egg, and herring with a glass of snaps. In late August, traditional restaurants like this one serve surströmming, fermented herring.

After dinner, the bars around Medborgarplatsen and Götgatan are where Söder goes out. Kvarnen, a beer hall from 1908, is the home pub of Hammarby football fans, and Mosebacke, above Slussen, has a terrace with a view in summer. If you're into beer, Söder is the heart of Stockholm's craft beer scene: Omnipollos Hatt for the local brewery Omnipollo, and Akkurat for Belgian beers and whisky.