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Coverage / Sweden

Sweden

Northern Europe

Northern Europe's largest Nordic country, reaching from the Baltic archipelagos and the medieval island of Gotland to the Arctic fells of Swedish Lapland. Sweden pairs deep wilderness, the King's Trail and Kebnekaise, aurora skies over Abisko and a Sami cultural heartland with design-led cities, world-class museums and a calendar of midsummer, medieval and film festivals.

12 activities · 13 pairings · 23 verified providers

What you can do in Sweden

Cycling / Bike Touring

GotlandMay Jun Jul Aug SepGotland is Sweden's cycling island, a flat, quiet, church-dotted land in the middle of the Baltic that is close to ideal for relaxed multi-day bike touring. The riding is easy underfoot, the roads are calm, and the distances between places worth stopping are short, so you cover an island of real variety at a gentle pace: limestone sea stacks called raukar standing off the shore, medieval Romanesque churches in nearly every parish, sheep meadows, pine forest and long sandy beaches. At its heart is Visby, one of the best-preserved medieval trading towns in northern Europe, ringed by an intact 13th-century wall and inscribed by UNESCO, a place to start and finish a loop. To the north the smaller island of Faro adds wild coastline and the raukar fields that Ingmar Bergman filmed. With good self-guided operators handling bikes, luggage and bookings, you ride hut to guesthouse over stages of around sixty kilometres, swimming and stopping at will. For unhurried island cycling with deep history at every turn, Gotland has few equals in the Nordic countries.

Dog Sledding

KirunaJan Feb Mar Apr Nov DecKiruna is the hub of the Swedish Arctic and the natural base for driving your own team of huskies across a frozen wilderness of forest, lake and open fell. Around the town and neighbouring Jukkasjarvi, small family kennels run tours from a single afternoon to week-long expeditions, and the appeal here is that you learn to drive the sled yourself rather than just ride: standing on the runners, braking and steering a team of a dozen dogs through snow-laden spruce and out onto the ice. The season is long and dependable, roughly November to April, with deep cold, reliable snow and the northern lights often overhead on the evening runs. Multi-day tours push into genuine backcountry, camping or sleeping in wilderness cabins, feeding and harnessing the dogs at dawn, and covering real distance day to day. Jukkasjarvi adds the original Icehotel, rebuilt each winter from Torne river ice, as a striking start or end point. For anyone who wants the Arctic at the pace of a working dog team, deep in snow and silence, Kiruna is the place.

Film Festivals

Goteborg Film FestivalGothenburgJan FebThe Goteborg Film Festival is the largest film festival in the Nordic countries and the reason to be in Gothenburg in late January, when the whole city turns to cinema. Founded in 1979, it draws around 270,000 visits and screens some 250 films from 80 countries over ten days, filling cinemas across the centre with premieres, retrospectives and Nordic debuts, and serving as the key meeting place for the region's film industry. Its top honour is the Dragon Award for best Nordic film, and its programming has a reputation for the bold and the experimental, from all-night marathons to one-off stunts like a single viewer marooned on a lighthouse island to watch films in isolation. Unlike the red-carpet glamour of the bigger festivals, Goteborg is a public festival, built for audiences as much as the industry, in a walkable, welcoming winter city of canals, cafes and seafood. Its 50th edition, a landmark anniversary, runs from 29 January to 7 February 2027. For a film traveller who wants the pulse of Nordic cinema at its source, this is the event.

Mountaineering / Summits

KebnekaiseJun Jul Aug SepKebnekaise is the roof of Sweden, a glaciated massif of twin summits above the Arctic fells, and its ascent is the country's classic mountaineering objective. The south peak, historically the higher of the two at around 2,096 metres, is capped by a glacier that has been melting fast enough that in some warm summers the ice-free north peak briefly becomes the true high point, a vivid marker of a warming Arctic. The standard western route is a long, non-technical but serious fell day of roughly 1,700 metres of ascent over snowfields and boulder to the summit ridge, well within reach of fit walkers with a guide. The harder eastern route crosses the Bjorling glacier and uses rope, crampons and a via-ferrata-style scramble, a genuine alpine outing. You climb from the STF Kebnekaise mountain station, itself a full day's walk or helicopter hop beyond the road end at Nikkaluokta, deep in Sami reindeer-herding country ringed by peaks and glaciers. Standing on the highest ground in Sweden under the near-endless summer light is a northern summit like no other.

Museums & Galleries

Stockholmyear-roundStockholm holds one of the richest museum landscapes in Europe, and two institutions in particular make it a destination for anyone who travels for galleries. The Vasa Museum on the island of Djurgarden is built around the Vasa, a royal warship that capsized on its maiden voyage in 1628, lay on the harbour bed for 333 years, and was raised almost fully intact in 1961: the only preserved 17th-century ship in the world, a towering, carved oak hull you walk around over several floors, and the most visited museum in Scandinavia. A short way across the water on Sodermalm, Fotografiska has become one of the world's leading contemporary photography museums, running a fast-changing programme of major shows in a converted Art Nouveau customs house on the harbour, open late into the night with a restaurant to match. Between them sit dozens more, from the open-air Skansen and the Nationalmuseum to the ABBA and Nobel museums, so a single walkable, water-threaded city lets you move from a Baroque warship to cutting-edge photography in an afternoon. For museum travellers, Stockholm is a full itinerary in itself.

Photography Expeditions

AbiskoJan Feb Mar Sep Oct Nov DecAbisko is widely rated the single best place on earth to photograph the aurora borealis, and a northern lights photo expedition here is the reason many travellers come north at all. The secret is the Tornetrask blue hole: the mountains west of the lake cast a rain shadow that keeps a pocket of sky unusually clear and dry even when the whole region is clouded, so on nights when nowhere else works, Abisko often does. From September to late March, under some of the darkest skies in Europe, guided photo groups set up on the frozen lake shore or ride the chairlift to the Aurora Sky Station at 900 metres on Mount Nuolja, learning the long-exposure settings that turn the green curtains into a frame. The same clear, still air gives crisp shots of the Lapporten valley, reflections, and star fields, and guides read the space-weather forecasts to chase the best displays. Because the darkness deepens as the walkers leave, autumn and deep winter are prime, and the cold, dry Abisko sky rewards patience with the most dependable aurora in the Arctic.

Sailing

Stockholm ArchipelagoJun Jul Aug SepThe Stockholm archipelago is one of the finest sailing grounds on earth, a scatter of some 30,000 islands running from the quays of the capital out to the open Baltic. What makes it exceptional is the density and the shelter: you can day-sail from island to island with barely an hour of open water between anchorages, tie up at a rock or a village jetty each night, and never run out of new sounds to explore across a whole summer. The water is tide-free and the winds are steady and forgiving, usually ten to twenty knots, which makes it a superb place both to charter with a skipper and to learn to sail from scratch. Inner islands are green and wooded with red-painted summer cabins and swimming rocks; the outer skerries are bare and wild, opening to the sea. Long Nordic evenings stretch the sailing day well into the night, and midsummer traditions, sauna and swim culture, and simple island restaurants give the cruising a distinctly Swedish rhythm. From a weekend escape to a week-long voyage, the archipelago rewards every level under sail.

Sea Kayaking / Canoeing

BohuslanMay Jun Jul Aug SepBohuslan is Sweden's sea-kayaking heartland and one of the great paddling coasts anywhere, a 150-kilometre chain of glacier-polished granite running from Gothenburg to the Norwegian border. The rock here is the draw: bare pink and grey islands worn smooth by ice, thousands of them, with sheltered sounds, narrow passages and open crossings that let you plan a route to any weather and skill level. At the northern end lies Kosterhavet, Sweden's first marine national park, a cold, clear sea holding some six thousand marine species, where paddlers thread between the Koster and Vaderoarna islands past seals, seabirds and Sweden's westernmost lighthouse. You camp freely on the skerries under the right of public access, land at old fishing villages like Grebbestad and Fjallbacka for fresh oysters and shrimp, and paddle the long light of a Nordic summer evening. The water is calm and tide-free but genuinely open to the sea, so a guide adds real safety on the exposed stretches. For clean granite, wild camping and world-class archipelago paddling, Bohuslan sets the standard.

Skiing & Snowsports

RiksgransenFeb Mar Apr May JunRiksgransen is the most northerly ski resort in Sweden and one of the strangest and best in the world, because here the season barely starts before spring and runs on until midsummer. Sitting right on the Norwegian border 200 kilometres above the Arctic Circle, it opens around February and stays open into late June, and its signature is midnight-sun skiing: in May and June the lifts run into the night and you can ski under a sun that never sets. The terrain is what draws serious skiers, a compact lift-served area backed by big off-piste bowls, couloirs and long ridge lines dropping toward the fjords, with easy access to guided ski touring and heli-skiing across the border peaks. Snow quality this far north stays cold and stable late into spring, and the light, low and golden for hours, is unlike anything in the Alps. The Arctic train from Narvik delivers you almost to the piste, past mountains and fjords, and the historic Meteorologen lodge sits beside the station. For spring skiing with a midnight sun, Riksgransen has no real equal.

Trekking / Hiking

AbiskoJun Jul Aug SepAbisko is the great northern gateway to the Kungsleden, the King's Trail, and the finest long-distance walking in Sweden. The classic and most scenic stretch runs 107 kilometres from Abisko south to Nikkaluokta at the foot of Kebnekaise, chosen by the Swedish Tourist Association as one of its Signature Trails: seven staffed mountain huts spaced a day apart, a route over the Tjaktja pass and along broad glacial valleys through the Abisko and Vadvetjakka national parks. You walk from birch forest into open fell, past reindeer, glacial rivers and the U-shaped Lapporten valley that frames every photo of the region. The trail is built for self-guided hikers, waymarked and hut to hut, so you carry a light pack and sleep warm, or camp freely under Sweden's right of public access. Above Abisko the land runs to the Norwegian border and the turquoise Trollsjon lake, some of the clearest water in the country, and in the long light of July and August the sun barely sets. This is the true Swedish Arctic, wild and walkable at once.

Wildlife Safaris

BergslagenMay Jun Jul Aug SepBergslagen, the forested old mining region of central Sweden, is the home of Swedish wildlife watching, and its signature outing is the summer moose safari. The moose, Europe's largest deer and the animal Swedes call the king of the forest, is shy and mostly nocturnal, so the classic experience is an evening safari: setting out at dusk with a guide who knows the clear-cuts, bogs and forest edges where the animals come out to feed in the long northern twilight, and watching a bull or a cow with calves emerge from the treeline. The same quiet woods and lakes hold Europe's densest signs of beaver, watched from a canoe at dusk as they cut and haul birch, and the region runs wolf-howling nights in late summer and guided brown bear hides in spring. Small, low-impact operators, several certified under Sweden's Nature's Best ecotourism label, keep groups tiny and lead you deep into working forest rather than any zoo or park. Only two hours from Stockholm, Bergslagen delivers genuinely wild encounters with the great mammals of the boreal forest, on foot and by paddle, under a sky that stays light past midnight.

Witness / Attend

Best months at a glance

	J	F	M	A	M	J	J	A	S	O	N	D
Cycling
Dog Sledding
Film Festivals
Mountaineering
Museums
Photography
Sailing
Sea Kayaking
Skiing
Trekking
Wildlife Safaris
Witness / Attend

Upcoming events in Sweden