Why you should visit Sweden in winter
– Swedes like to be outdoors, even in the cold, says Birgitta Palmér Visit Stockholm. “We dress warmly, go for walks or ski, and then you go into a cafe with all red cheeks and get cozy.”
This ancient harbor town gets into the winter mood with lots of small fires everywhere. Small flames in sidewalk burners flank the doors of cafes and shops, a wood-burning welcome into the great indoors of a culture that knows how to cozy up to the dark months.
At noon on a day just after the winter solstice, the sun is barely above the treetops. Swedes compensate for the truncated day by doubling fires and torches and searchlights. The funky and welcoming Hotel Hasselbackenwrapped in lots of holiday bulbs, glowed like a little Vegas in the middle Royal island Djurgårdenthe city’s museum quarter by the harbor.
– This is how we survive, all light and light, says Karin Pettersson, lifelong Stockholmer and editor at Sweden’s largest daily newspaper. We met near the city’s central station for “fika” – the Swedish quick break for coffee and ginger. “April is pretty much all spring.”
Stockholm is a port city, dotted with ferry routes and marinas. We took a boat trip to Gamla Stan, the city’s sprawling old quarter, and after shopping for lambskin gloves and Moomin mugs, found excellent Italian food in a vaulted brick cellar.
It was more traditional Swedish food grilling at The shelter, a large outdoor museum of culture and heritage. The smell of moose meat and fried chanterelles wafted over stalls hawking limp and rosehip soup and pancakes fried with lingonberries. People cooked their own sausage over communal fires that were kept lit for this purpose.
This is the hearty fuel that drives many out to the city’s local winter sports, including cross-country skiing, snowshoeing and sledding, all within the city limits. Skaters are everywhere, in city park rinks and on dozens of lakes; with the deep freeze comes guided long-distance skating tours of the Baltic bays.
If you’re more of an indoor type, a range of world-class and well-heated museums await: The Spirit Museum is worth it just for the gift shop. The speeches of the award winners keep coming The Nobel Prize Museumand earworm hits current at Abba museum. Ship lovers have it best, between them The Maritime Museumthe The Viking Museumthe The Wreck Museum and the spectacularly preserved Vasathe tall 17th-century warship raised intact from Stockholm harbor some 330 years after it capsized and sank minutes into its maiden voyage.
We took the double decker Cinderella north into the filigree of islands that separate Stockholm from the open Baltic Sea. On Vaxholmsön, in the heart of the archipelago, it was a short roll from the gangway to the quay Waxholms Hotela warm vintage sanctuary in Art Nouveau style with a spectacular view of the ancient Vaxholm fortress from its wrap-around dining window.
During the cold months, the village that is chock full of tourists in the summer settles down for its long winter nap. The local shops along the main street are filled with thick woolen and lambskin gloves.
Annika Mattson, co-founder of Vaxholm Yoga Center invites winter visitors to walk the winding lanes for a Scandinavian architecture tutorial: classic frame cottages all glow, many of them, including Mattson’s 17th-century house, painted in the distinctive red pigment falu.
“It’s beautiful year-round, but in the winter comes the calm,” Mattson said.
Two of us braved the cold to kayak through the semi-frozen water. “The ice tells us where to go,” guide Andy Jurkowski said as we paddled through the channel that a friendly work boat had just plowed through the crust.
“This is where Andy asked me to marry him,” said his wife Milena at the entrance to a rocky cove as we glided past dozens of sleeping summer homes. We ended the trip by falling, on purpose, into the freezing water and braved a dip between steamy moments in the couple’s sauna.
On land we met Linda Wahlström, and she invited us to the hill B&B she runs to warm herself with a glass of mulled wine, the Swedish mulled wine and some grilled Stockholm sausages. She was delighted to hear about our baptism at Baltic earlier in the day.
“Now you’re Swedish,” she said and toasted us with mulled wine.
It took one flight to tip us nine degrees north to Kiruna, just above the Arctic Circle, where there is severe winter. Extremophiles have long come here for the sub-zero thrill of cross-country skiing and reindeer viewing in the dark days of the season. But more and more families are flocking from climates where winter wanes just to be in fail-safe snow.
“They want to experience the ‘Arctic lifestyle,'” says Håkan Stenlund Swedish Lapland. “Of course, when it’s below zero, sometimes it’s enough to make a coffee on the fire and then go back inside.”
Stenlund points visitors to a growing infrastructure of hotels and outfitters that provide the hot coffee, along with snowmobile safaris and dog sledding that are the main draw of the season. He points the many aurora seekers to the village of Abisko, famous for boasting some of the most dramatic and reliable aurora shows on earth.
We chose the place that put this region on the tourism map three decades ago, it the world’s first Icehotel on the nearby Torne River. A mix of conventional hotel rooms and chambers sculpted from solid ice, the resort is a sanctuary for – and a hub for – deep winter.
Based for two nights in regular (read “heated”) rooms, we ventured out for hours, saved from the cold by explorer-grade snowsuits from the hotel. We snowmobiled across the frozen river and through the snowy woods, including a late night ride under the green magnetic sky. Dogs dragged us for hours to a forest-warming hut and back.
We sculpted figures from blocks of crystal clear ice harvested from Torne (my sparkly winter hat won a prize!) and wandered for Christmas Eve dinner at a preserved 18th century farm. Next to where Nutti Sámi Siidaan open-air museum dedicated to the culture of the local indigenous people.
In the end we went to hard freeze and spent our last night at the Icehotel itself. There are 24 ice rooms built from blocks cut fresh every winter and various suites sculpted by artists and mechanically frozen year-round, along with a bar and gallery. Ours was the fanciful ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ suite, with flowers buried in the frozen walls, coffee table and bed.
It was freezing pizza weather in there, but with a heated bathroom attached and an “expedition sleeping bag” provided, the coldest night of our lives was one of the coziest.