Discover Gothenburg

Why visit Gothenburg

Gothenburg (Göteborg) is Sweden's second city and the country's industrial workhorse — a calm, leafy west-coast port with around 600,000 residents (1 million in the wider metropolitan area), founded in 1621 by King Gustavus Adolphus and famous for the Volvo car factory (still here, with a brilliant Volvo Museum at the original Hisingen factory site). The compact city centre is laid out around the Dutch-engineered canal system (Gothenburg was designed by Dutch engineers; the visual character is more Amsterdam than Stockholm), with the wide tree-lined Avenyn boulevard cutting north from the cultural anchor of Götaplatsen — home to the brilliant Gothenburg Museum of Art (with Sweden's best collection of late 19th-century Nordic painting, including Anders Zorn and Carl Larsson), the Gothenburg Concert Hall, and the famous Poseidon fountain. The historic Haga district just west, lined with restored 19th-century wooden houses, has the best cafe scene in town (don't miss the giant cinnamon buns at Café Husaren). The harbour-side Maritiman museum (largest floating-ship museum in the world) and the spectacular Liseberg amusement park (the largest in Scandinavia) round out the headlines. Don't miss day trips to the magical Bohuslän coast just north (the granite fishing village of Smögen and the brightly painted Marstrand) and a long lazy seafood lunch at the Fisketorget fish market.