1 destination · 10 things to do

Sweden

Stockholm is a capital built on water and on fourteen islands, where ochre and rust-red merchant houses crowd a medieval old town, a royal palace faces a working harbour, and ferries leave from the city centre for an archipelago of tens of thousands of islands. This guide books Stockholm properly — the Vasa, the warship that sank on her maiden voyage in 1628 and came back almost whole, with the Vrak wreck museum on the same ticket; Skansen, the world's first open-air museum, with its farmsteads and Nordic animals; ABBA The Museum and the Avicii Experience for the city's pop genius; Fotografiska on the Södermalm waterfront; and the Nobel Prize Museum on the old town square — and pairs it with the free and official sights that make the city: the lanes of Gamla Stan, the Royal Palace and its changing of the guard, a guided tour of City Hall where the Nobel banquet is held, and a ferry to Vaxholm. Then it matches you to the right hotel, from the Grand Hôtel across the water from the palace to a 1699 island hideaway, an old town townhouse, Benny Andersson's hotel on Södermalm and a design hostel near Central Station, because in a city of islands, where you sleep decides which bridges you cross every day.