Famous Landmarks in Stockholm
Fourteen islands of medieval brick and Baroque stone where a lake meets the Baltic Sea.
Stockholm's landmarks sit across the islands where Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic, and each belongs to a different phase of the city's growth. The medieval core on Gamla Stan holds the oldest fabric: Storkyrkan, begun in the thirteenth century and dedicated in 1306, and the former Greyfriars church on Riddarholmen, opened around 1300 and used since as a royal burial place. Facing them across the water on Stadsholmen stands Stockholm Palace, a Baroque quadrangle built over a burned medieval castle and finished in 1754. Two later additions read differently: Stockholm City Hall on Kungsholmen, finished in 1923, mixes Renaissance, Baroque and Art Nouveau motifs under a National Romantic manner, while the Nordic Museum on Djurgården, completed in 1907, houses an ethnographic collection founded decades earlier.
Stockholm City Hall
1923 · Ragnar Östberg
Recognisable for its mix of Art Nouveau, Renaissance and Baroque motifs under a National Romantic manner, and for standing right at the water's edge, facing two neighbouring islands across the channel.
Stockholm City Hall is the seat of the municipal council, holding offices, conference rooms and ceremonial halls rather than a single grand chamber. It stands on the eastern tip of Kungsholmen, beside Riddarfjärden, facing Riddarholmen and Södermalm. Designed by Ragnar Östberg and finished in 1923, it blends Art Nouveau, Renaissance and Baroque elements within a National Romantic design. Its ceremonial halls host the Nobel Prize banquet each year, and the building ranks among the city's most visited sites.
- The building also contains a restaurant, Stadshuskällaren.
Photo: Arild Vågen (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Stockholm Palace
1754 · Carl Hårleman
Recognisable by its uniform Baroque facades enclosing a large quadrangle, its Rococo state interiors, and its position in the old town directly beside the national legislature.
Stockholm Palace is the official residence of the Swedish monarch, though the king and queen actually live at Drottningholm Palace; this building instead houses royal offices and the Royal Court and is used for state occasions. It stands in Gamla stan, next to the Riksdag, on the site of the medieval Tre Kronor Castle, destroyed by fire in 1697. Nicodemus Tessin the Younger designed the replacement; after his death in 1728, Carl Hårleman completed it and added much of its Rococo interior. It was ready for use in 1754.
Photo: Pudelek (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Storkyrkan
1306
Recognisable for its contrast between old and new: a uniformly Baroque exterior from an eighteenth-century remodelling wrapped around a late-medieval hall-church interior of vaulted brick on brick pillars, set between a royal palace and an old market square.
The oldest church in the city, dedicated to Saint Nicholas in 1306 though construction likely began in the thirteenth century. It stands in Gamla stan between the royal palace and the old main square. The interior keeps its late-medieval hall-church form, with a vaulted ceiling on brick pillars, while the exterior was made uniformly Baroque in eighteenth-century changes. It was the scene of Sweden's first vernacular Mass during the Reformation, became the seat of the Bishop of Stockholm in 1942, and hosted a royal wedding in 2010.
- Crown Princess Victoria married Daniel Westling here in 2010.
- It became the seat of the Bishop of Stockholm only in 1942, despite being the city's oldest church.
Photo: W. Bulach (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Riddarholmen Church
1300
A compact Gothic-style former friary church whose interior is given over to royal tombs and memorials rather than pews, marking it as a mausoleum more than a place of ordinary worship.
Riddarholmen Church began as the church of a medieval Greyfriars monastery and, opening around 1300, is one of the city's oldest buildings. It is built in the Gothic style and has served for centuries as the final resting place of most Swedish monarchs, a role that has defined its interior and its upkeep ever since. Per Axel Nyström, who died in 1868, is the architect credited with the building, though the record here does not specify which part of the structure his work covered.
Photo: Nordelch (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Nordic Museum
1907 · Isak Gustaf Clason
Identifiable by its setting on an island largely given over to museums and parkland, and by its exhibits devoted entirely to Swedish cultural history and folk life from the early modern period to the present, rather than to any single specialised subject.
The Nordic Museum is devoted to the cultural history and ethnography of Sweden from the early modern period, which in Swedish history is dated from 1520, up to the present. Artur Hazelius founded it in the late nineteenth century on Djurgården, and it long formed part of the open-air museum Skansen, which he also founded, until the two institutions separated in 1963. Its standing building was completed in 1907; Isak Gustaf Clason is credited as architect, alongside Magnus Isæus, who died in 1890.
Photo: Matti Blume (CC BY-SA 4.0)
History
Stockholm was founded in 1252 by the statesman Birger Jarl on islands where Lake Mälaren drains into the Baltic, and its oldest surviving buildings cluster on Gamla Stan, the original settlement. A royal residence has stood on the same spot by Norrström since the mid-thirteenth century; the medieval Tre Kronor Castle that occupied it burned down in 1697, and its Baroque replacement, delayed for nearly two decades by the Great Northern War, was not ready until 1754. Close by, Storkyrkan and the former Greyfriars church on Riddarholmen carried the city's ecclesiastical life from around 1300, the latter becoming the burial church of most Swedish monarchs. Growth beyond the old islands came later: Stockholm City Hall, seat of the municipal council, was finished on Kungsholmen in 1923, and the Nordic Museum, founded in 1873 to record Swedish cultural history, opened its current building on Djurgården in 1907.