The Swedish capital sprawls over 200 inhabited islands and thousands more without people. A carefully-planned itinerary over three days got us to our top three cultural attractions and included a picturesque wander through the old town, but we left with several top picks on our list … notably the Vasa Museum, a harbour tour and Drottningholm Palace … untouched. The first two are where most visitors start. What did we do differently?
We were on a hunt for Vikings, celebration of a local holiday and infectious pop music. With a few adjustments had we known more in advance, we probably could have fit at least one more attraction in. But we enjoyed every moment and, given it was the opening salvo in a two-week holiday, felt no need to rush.
Stockholm is the departure city for our “Viking Homelands” cruise, an adventure around the Baltic, up Denmark and along the west of Norway that’s been high on my Anglo-Danish husband’s holiday dream list for quite a while. So it seemed fitting to start out with his ancestors, those famed longboat raiders of yore.
Swedish History Museum
Here’s where careful research helped enormously. A simple search for “Vikings” and “Stockholm” will point you directly to something called the Viking Museum in Djurgården, an island given over to cultural and entertainment attractions. This “museum”, however, is an entirely commercial enterprise that’s low on actual artefacts, high on admission price (189 krona, just under £15), and heavy on irritated TripAdvisor reviews. Nowhere in the first couple of search return pages will you find the Swedish History Museum, despite the fact that it has the largest single collection of Viking artefacts in the world. This includes a jaw-dropping treasure room with more than 3000 objects (440 pounds of silver and 115 of gold) and a main exhibition hall renovated just two years ago to bring it to the highest interactive standards. If you need proof of why to be wary of Google searches, here it is. Though, admittedly, it should also be a motivator to the museum staff to search optimise their web presence.
I have spent a lot of time exploring Viking culture since acquiring my own Dane, and this is indeed the best collection we’ve seen all in one place. Though the museum at Jelling, Denmark, still edges Stockholm out for the best use of audio-visual interpretation, and perfection would include a proper Viking ship like the ones at Roskilde. But that’s picking holes in what is otherwise an exceptional collection.
Start in the basement, where museum builders blasted a vault into the bedrock to secure jaw-dropping treasures. Real pirates may not have buried their treasure, but Vikings did. A lot. The museum’s “Gold Room”, which lies down a showy painted staircase and through some impressive vault doors, shows off the finds from scores of “hoards” unearthed across the country. There are mountains of coins here, dating all the way back to the Romans and spanning the then-known world; proof of the Vikings’ impressive reach. Heavy chains and bars of precious metal were other ways of carrying cash. But easiest on the eye is a dazzling variety of jewellery, most notably some exceptional gold collars.
Once you’ve gawped your fill, head upstairs to dive into an exploration of who these people actually were. There’s more treasure in these galleries, but the real focus is on the domestic objects that tell us how they lived, from ornate drinking horns and glasses to humble craftspeople’s tools, swords to ploughshares. Individual sections explore runes, writing and the stories that defined them; craftspeople, their tools and art; the farming and trading life beyond raiding; and the fascinating area of religious beliefs, an often confused mash-up of paganism and Christianity. There’s plenty of interactive fun to be had here, from tying sailor’s knots to writing in runes to exploring a 3-D model of the Viking religious world, from the serpent wrapped around the World Tree all the way up to Valhalla.
There’s enough here to easily keep you busy for a couple of hours, and that’s without wandering upstairs to similarly interactive galleries that explore the rest of Swedish history, everything in English as well as Swedish. The History Museum is a bargain at 150 krona (£11.67) for adults, and despite our attendance on a holiday weekend Sunday it wasn’t hugely crowded. Highly recommended.
Skansen
By sheer coincidence we were in Stockholm on Walpurgis Night, a festival of bonfires that welcomes spring and has long roots back to Christian witch burning and pagan festivals. We were assured by both the internet and locals that the best place to experience Walpurgis would be at Skansen, a 75-acre open air museum that houses a collection of historic architecture from around the country, moved here to form one of the world’s first “folk parks”. So we arrived around 2pm, assuming there would be lots to do to keep us busy until the entertainment programme started at 8:30 pm. The limit of internet research again reared its head, this time not in our favour.
While an enormous bonfire was laid, an intriguing line-up of bands was promised and the web site insisted Skansen was open all day and into the evening on this holiday, none of the historic building interiors were actually open. Wandering in and out as employees in historic dress spin tales was supposed to be part of the appeal of the place. The web site also implied there would be people in folk costumes dancing and generally enlivening the place. In reality, other than the girls at the gate and a few people emptying rubbish bins, we wondered if anyone was working there at all. There’s only so much time you can spend wandering around looking at the outside of historic rural buildings, no matter how charming the parkland they’re set within is. The six and a half hours until Walpurgis kickoff that had seemed necessary now felt like ann eternity. And the plaza where the show would take place was on the highest part of Djurgården, lashed by the winds racing along the watery channel below. (Baltic is synonymous with freezing for a reason.) Waiting around was going to be bone chilling. We couldn’t leave and re-enter, or we might have headed to the nearby ABBA or Vasa museums. Instead we checked out early, leaving space for smart locals who probably weren’t going to turn up for another hour.
Despite that planning misfire, I had a brilliant couple of hours walking around the park. A wide variety of buildings are all laid out in beautiful environments. There are a couple of affluent country estates with formal gardens, several farms of different styles complete with farmyards and animals, summer houses, churches, hunting cabins, festival halls and other civic buildings. There’s even a small town centre with commercial buildings of the 18th and 19th century. It’s all very picturesque, though would clearly be even more attractive in late June once the gardens were in full bloom.
My favourite bit, however, was the zoo. As a childless cultural tourist, I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a zoo on holiday. But since it was built in to a cultural attraction, I had the freedom to wander. Sadly the otters were as absent as the employees, but a quartet of Swedish brown bears had just emerged from hibernation and captivated me for quite a while. The bear enclosure here is beautifully designed with several different areas ringing a hillside, offering the bears everything from a bathing area with waterfalls to woodland climbing spaces to a grass lawn for napping in the sun. All with glass panels for the humans to peer through in appreciation.
A bit further along is a wolverine enclosure that I also found compelling. I knew they could be vicious beasts, but I had no idea they were so cute. An owl enclosure and unusually bold red squirrels completed my joy. (British reds are almost extinct and those that exist at home are notoriously shy.)
Big picture: Skansen is delightful but wouldn’t have made it into our top three without the Walpurgis lure, and that didn’t live up to the hype.
The ABBA Museum
You might not expect it, given how much opera and other “worthy” culture dominates the pages of this blog, but we agreed in advance this needed to be our No. 1 cultural destination in Stockholm and it didn’t disappoint.
British readers are chuckling, while the Americans are no doubt perplexed. “You’ve got to be kidding … why?” reacted one university friend. I admit, I didn’t “get” ABBA when I moved to England, either. They’d only had one No. 1 hit in the States, didn’t tour much there and were consigned by most Americans into a mental bucket with all the other tacky things from the ‘70s that deserved to be left in the dustbin of history. Then I moved to a land that was ABBA obsessed, even before Mamma Mia revived ABBA’s work on stage and screen. Every British celebration that wants to fill the dance floor resorts to their tunes. Not only do most Brits know most of the words, the Swedish quartet seems to unlock British inhibitions faster than free pints at the pub. After 25 years of exposure in my adopted homeland I now see the group as superlative artists who created the best pop songbook in history. Yes, even better than Michael Jackson. If your head is in that place, then it’s no wonder their attraction ranks higher than Viking loot, resurrected boats and harbour tours in a visit to Stockholm.
The museum, tucked in between Skansen and the roller coaster-packed Gröna Lund on Djurgården, is built into a basement of an unimpressive modern building. The delights below belie the humble exterior. The museum combines costumes, memorabilia, news coverage and informative labels to tell the band’s story from their individual musical beginnings. Each was already forging a successful musical career when an impresario put them together and created magic. The story here not only covers their glory days but brings things right up to date with the films, stage shows and further careers of each member.
There’s some fabulous insight into their song writing processes and whole rooms lifted from special places in their lives: their main recording studio, the inside of the cabin where they did most of their writing, the costume shop. The collection of original costumes is a delight, and if you want to have a rest you can watch a whole concert recorded in London in 1979.
The best parts, however, are the interactive experiences. There are karaoke booths next to that recording studio where you can pretend you’re laying down a track. Try sound mixing one of their hits to see the impact the right balances have. Pose for a photo shoot and have your face hilariously grafted onto one of the band members’ bodies. Or, best of all, step up on stage to perform as a fifth member with avatars of the band from their heyday.
The ABBA Museum
You might not expect it, given how much opera and other “worthy” culture dominates the pages of this blog, but we agreed in advance this needed to be our No. 1 cultural destination in Stockholm and it didn’t disappoint.
British readers are chuckling, while the Americans are no doubt perplexed. “You’ve got to be kidding … why?” reacted one university friend. I admit, I didn’t “get” ABBA when I moved to England, either. They’d only had one No. 1 hit in the States, didn’t tour much there and were consigned by most Americans into a mental bucket with all the other tacky things from the ‘70s that deserved to be left in the dustbin of history. Then I moved to a land that was ABBA obsessed, even before Mamma Mia revived ABBA’s work on stage and screen. Every British celebration that wants to fill the dance floor resorts to their tunes. Not only do most Brits know most of the words, the Swedish quartet seems to unlock British inhibitions faster than free pints at the pub. After 25 years of exposure in my adopted homeland I now see the group as superlative artists who created the best pop songbook in history. Yes, even better than Michael Jackson. If your head is in that place, then it’s no wonder their attraction ranks higher than Viking loot, resurrected boats and harbour tours in a visit to Stockholm.
The museum, tucked in between Skansen and the roller coaster-packed Gröna Lund on Djurgården, is built into a basement of an unimpressive modern building. The delights below belie the humble exterior. The museum combines costumes, memorabilia, news coverage and informative labels to tell the band’s story from their individual musical beginnings. Each was already forging a successful musical career when an impresario put them together and created magic. The story here not only covers their glory days but brings things right up to date with the films, stage shows and further careers of each member.
There’s some fabulous insight into their song writing processes and whole rooms lifted from special places in their lives: their main recording studio, the inside of the cabin where they did most of their writing, the costume shop. The collection of original costumes is a delight, and if you want to have a rest you can watch a whole concert recorded in London in 1979.
The best parts, however, are the interactive experiences. There are karaoke booths next to that recording studio where you can pretend you’re laying down a track. Try sound mixing one of their hits to see the impact the right balances have. Pose for a photo shoot and have your face hilariously grafted onto one of the band members’ bodies. Or, best of all, step up on stage to perform as a fifth member with avatars of the band from their heyday.
At 250 krona (about £19.50) it was the most expensive bit of sightseeing we did in Stockholm but worth every penny; completely unique and pure fun. With an infectious soundtrack. Do book in advance, however. Tickets sell out and, even if available, walk ups have to wait until there’s room in that magic basement.
Later that afternoon we checked onto our cruise aboard the Viking Jupiter, and the next day took their escorted tour of the old town. With 48 hours in the city now under our belts, the size and transportation logistics around town dissuaded us from packing anything else in.
The old town is a lovely place to ramble. It’s mostly baroque and pastel painted in architecture, hillier than I’d anticipated and characterised by narrow, cobbled lanes. There were fewer shops than I expected so, though we had little free time after our guided tour, I didn’t feel deprived to be ushered back to the bus. Like Skansen, it seemed more about looking at the outside of buildings than interacting with anything.
It was clear by then, however, looking across the water from the palace at the skyline of impressive museums, civic institutions and historic neighbourhoods, that we’d barely scratched the surface. Brits may be able to get to Stockholm easily for a holiday weekend, but you’ll need more than that to get to know
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