Travel

An island-hopping idyll in Sweden’s Bohuslän archipelago


The Swedes have single words for things that take other languages a whole sentence. Take Jantelagen. Literally, “Jante’s Law”, it describes the importance of never thinking you are something special. I found it charming, this Swedish diffidence. But then I had come straight from Rome where arm-flailing exaggeration passes for normality.

Swedish modesty is particularly odd because the Swedes have a great deal to be proud of. Gothenburg, where I had landed, is one of the world’s most sustainable cities. Even the bus from the airport into town runs on a biofuel produced from rapeseed.

But it was the ball bearings that caught my eye, exhibited in a glass case in the luggage hall. Aligned ball bearings are one of Sweden’s great inventions. A local company, the imaginatively named Swedish Ball Bearing Factory, or SKF, is the colossus of the ball-bearing world, their rows of small lubricated balls reducing rotational friction from Alaska to Zanzibar.

Ball bearings seem a very Swedish thing, along with seat belts, flat-pack furniture and social democracy, keeping wheels turning smoothly with the minimum of fuss. It is how we see the Swedes, and perhaps how they see themselves — aligned, co-operative, equable, frictionless, a land of sensible, utilitarian, measured fairness. I am sure there must be difficult, contrary Swedes out there somewhere, but in a week in Sweden I met only agreeable, bright-eyed folk. They all spoke excellent English in those delightful accents and looked like advertisements for a line of health food products.

Spectators sit in the foreground watching as multiple sailing boats cluster in a harbour
A sailing boat race around the island of Tjörn © Alamy

I was heading to the Bohuslän archipelago, where Swedish forests falter towards the west coast and the country splinters into more than 8,000 islands and skerries. Running north from Gothenburg more than 100 miles up to the Norwegian border, the islands are populated with brightly painted wooden cottages of Scandinavian simplicity, many of them owned over generations by the same families.

Bohuslän is a labyrinth of grey and pink granite islands, stalked by distant lighthouses and wind-blown trees, bathed in that pristine Nordic light. Storms march around long horizons and sudden sun escapes the tumult of clouds to turn the world on its head. Bohuslän is a happily peripheral kind of place, remote, barren, isolated, bleakly and stunningly beautiful. It has a rigging-tapping, gull-crying, wind-moaning, wave-crashing soundtrack. It is a place of solitudes, of empty spaces, of sea and sky.

Most people travel to the archipelago by car, up empty roads shadowing the coast, past forests of pine and hillsides of rock and heather, crossing bridges, confused by a bays and inlets and straits, until you are never sure if you are on an island or some outcrop of the mainland. But there is a new way to explore, on board the Granit, a boat launched this year (and named after the coast’s dominant rock) that will take passengers on a sea odyssey through the archipelago, staying at some of Bohuslän’s best hotels, and eating in some of its best restaurants.

A dark-hulled boat pulls into a harbour
All aboard the Granit for a cruise of the islands

Smart, sturdy, gun-metal grey, the Granit is the kind of craft you would use if you were a Norwegian admiral coming ashore to reclaim the coast that was once yours. Carrying six people in comfort, it is splendidly Scandinavian — no fuss, no bling, just a modest and sensible boat. And one that runs on fossil-free biodegradable fuels.


My first landfall was on the island of Marstrand. On this coast, it was herring that made fortunes and shaped lives, built churches and conjured dreams — and then attracted the wrong sort. As early as the 16th century, when the seas were silver with fish, an excess of herring had made Marstrand “the most depraved town in Scandinavia”.

But herring is a fickle resource. Their runs have a habit of inexplicably changing. When they eventually abandoned these seas, Marstrand was obliged to go straight. By the mid-19th century, it was reinventing itself as a seaside resort, tuned to the Swedish passion for sea air and sea-bathing. The king came every summer, to skip between a hot sauna and a cold sea, and the island became fashionable.

I stayed in a hotel that he would have used — the 19th-century Kurhotellet, a beautiful renovated time capsule of Scandi chic, all grey wooden walls and tall sea windows overlooking the sound. Across the square, I had lunch in the Societetshuset, or Society House, whose 19th-century chandeliered ballroom still hosts smart weddings. The heir to the throne, Princess Victoria, was here only the other day, the waiters whispered, with the breathless admiration of people who have not had to listen to royals being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey.

These days, the peaceful islands of Bohuslän are one of those mythical places that octogenarians rattle on about, an innocent world where people don’t lock their doors. Framed by granite shores, accessed by narrow harbours, their roofs pitched against the weather, the houses and boat sheds are usually painted white or a clotted red, a pigment that traditionally came from iron-rich earth mixed with oil from fish liver. Through their windows, I could see models of ships, fishing tackle and oilskins hung on wooden pegs.

A view on to a beach through a window of many small panes
View from Kurhotellet, a 19th-century hotel on the island of Marstrand  © Katja Ragnstam
A 19th-century hotel of ornate gables, a terrace and green-painted frames faces the sea
And Marstrand’s Societetshuset, or Society House, built in 1886 and now used for weddings and events

Out of season, when winds moan around the corners of houses, flatten the rough grasses, hurl the waves against the granite shores, these islands are inhabited only by a few hundred permanent residents; in the summer the populations swell to several thousand. Among the permanent inhabitants on the island of Orust are Marcel van der Eng and Johan Buskqvist who run Lådfabriken, where I stayed another night, an upmarket four-room guest house charmingly created from a former fish crate factory, where you can sit in the “lighthouse” watching the sea birds on their garden shore.

Back at sea, I was happy on the cosy Granit, as it navigated between rocks that rose from the waves like the smooth backs of whales. On the island of Tjörn, I hopped on a bike and took the cycle path to the Nordic Watercolour Museum, whose airy galleries on the edge of a smoke-grey inlet had an exhibition of illustrators of children’s books, flights of quirky fancy that suited these innocent islands. (It also has five guest studios to rent, on stilts over the water, each sleeping two.)

A 40-minute cycle ride took me to the open-air sculpture museum at Pilane. With 360-degree views over a landscape clad in granite and heather and framed by restless seas and that endless sky, it has site-specific pieces by artists such as Tony Cragg, Maria Miesenberger and, this summer, Ai Weiwei.

A gigantic white sculpture of a woman’s head with her eyes closed. In the foreground, human figures are dwarfed by the scale of the sculpture
‘Anna’, a statue by Jaume Plensa at Pilane Sculpture Park

The most striking permanent piece is “Anna” by Jaume Plensa. Now a landmark in the archipelago, this white 15-metre-high head faces that ravishing view with eyes closed, turning us all back in on ourselves, to our own interior landscapes and, given the location, to our own mortality. On the slopes immediately beneath her, sharing her weather and her view, are standing stones and burial mounds marking Iron Age graves.


On the island of Klädesholmen, we moored at Salt & Sill, Sweden’s first floating hotel, where dinner is fit for an admiral’s table and the rooms are like ship’s cabins.

In the morning, I stopped on the island of Dyrön, where things were so quiet that the only person in the grocery store was an elderly granny knitting. She eyed me carefully over her spectacles, while I stocked up on supplies. Then I took the coastal trail round the island, where wild mouflon sheep, with horns the size of broad swords, watched me from vertiginous perches as if they might be in league with Grocery Granny.

In the tiny northern harbour, I ran into Annika Kristensson, who runs the boats taking the island’s children to school across the water. Annika seemed to think I looked a bit under the weather, and prescribed the essential Swedish cure. With a bag of fruit, a beer and a towel, she packed me off to an isolated grey wooden building — the island sauna. It was time to get naked.

No one does naked quite like the Swedes. It is a something of a national obsession, rather like pickled herring and ball bearings. To be fair, most Swedes are not really nudists, but they love nothing more than a naked swim in the sea, usually in gendered-separate areas. In the sauna too, among friends or members of your own sex, naked is the thing.

As I was alone, I decided to go full Swedish. After self-basting in my own sweat for half an hour, I skipped outside to lower myself down a swim ladder into the cold sea. Swedes all swear by this leap between extreme heat and extreme cold, seeing it as a cure for everything from heart conditions to bloating.

A small grey-painted wooden cabin with a wooden walkway near the sea
A sauna cabin on the island of Dyrön © Stanley Stewart

I am not so sure. Any cure that involves mild panic doesn’t temperamentally suit me. I was only seconds in the ice-cold water before I felt my brain slowing. Worrying I might slip into a coma, I shot back up the ladder, pink and naked as a salmon fillet, only to find two women standing at the top. With a mumbled apology, I bolted back into the sauna. I needn’t have fretted. They were Swedes. They hardly raised an eyebrow.


On Käringön, I had oysters and champagne with Camilla Hofsten, whose family had been on the island since the 17th century. She and her father, Kenth, run the Karingo Oyster Bar in her grandmother’s beautifully renovated boat house. Out on their dock, we hauled nets up to pick a dozen fresh oysters from the sea. With a shucking knife, I levered them open in the wood-lined bar as Camilla reminded me to chew them before swallowing to get the full taste.

Upstairs, at an elegantly laid table overlooking the sea, her father served the most delicious fisksoppa (fish soup) served with chunks of sourdough bread. Later, he emerged from the kitchen to tell stories — in the careful English he had learnt as a boy from the radio — of his grandfather who sailed to Iceland on wooden ships, 13 men at sea for two months, sleeping on the open decks, fishing the herring runs that had abandoned Marstrand a century before and bringing them home salted in barrels.

On the last day, I called in on Åstol, one the prettiest of the islands, where four churches serve just over 200 locals. Late to abandon its old Norse Gods, Sweden fell hard for the ideals of the Reformation, and became adamantly Lutheran, a denomination that tended to fundamentalism and teetotalism. In years past, attendance at Sunday service was mandatory, and it was only in 1951 that Swedish Lutherans were legally allowed to leave the church without offering a good reason. On devout Åstol, curtains were a sign of debauchery. It was felt that there should be nothing going on indoors that needed to be hidden from the neighbours.

In the Åstol Smokehouse, once a repository for ice shipped from Norway, and now a fine restaurant and bar, I joined a long candle-lit table of boisterous locals for four different courses of fish. They poured one another hearty glasses of wine, unconcerned about curtainless windows.

The woman next to me began to explain the finer points of fisksoppa — the fat pieces of cod, the north Atlantic prawns, the sour cream in the broth, just the right amount of saffron. Then a look of recognition came into her eyes.

“Ah, but we have met before,” she laughed. “On Dyrön. I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on.”

Details

Stanley Stewart was a guest of Original Travel (originaltravel.co.uk), which offers a four-day private trip on the Granit from £3,320 per person, full-board with three nights’ hotel accommodation on the islands — as well as two nights in Gothenburg, return flights from London, transfers and all daily activities.

Galleries — For details of Pilane Sculpture Park, see pilane.org; the Nordic Watercolour Museum, akvarellmuseet.org

Restaurants — For the Karingo Oyster Bar, see karingo.com; Åstol Smokehouse, astolsrokeri.se.

Hotels — Kurhotellet on Marstrand is at marstrandskurhotell.com; Salt & Sill on Klädesholmen, saltosill.se; Lådfabriken on Orust, ladfabriken.eu

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