Swedish cities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 4 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Sweden guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 12 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Stockholm

Stockholm was founded in the thirteenth century on the islands at that outlet, where a chain could be drawn across the water to control everything going in or out of the lake, and the old town still stands on one of them. The built-up area spreads over fourteen islands and holds about a million people, with roughly 2.4 million in the wider region.

Göteborg

Gustav II Adolf chartered the city in 1621 and had Dutch engineers lay it out, which is why the center is a grid cut by canals and defended by a moat. It gave Sweden a port outside the Sound and therefore outside Danish tolls. The harbor is the largest in the Nordic countries, and Volvo has built cars here since 1927.

Malmö

Malmö is the third largest city in Sweden and was Danish until 1658. The Öresund Bridge, open since 1 July 2000, runs eight kilometers from here to an artificial island and then dives into a tunnel for the last stretch, so that ships and aircraft into Copenhagen airport both have clear passage. Turning Torso, finished in 2005, twists ninety degrees over its 190 meters.

Kiruna

Kiruna was built in the 1890s around the largest underground iron ore mine in the world, and the ore body runs at an angle beneath the town. Mining it undermines the ground the buildings stand on, so since 2004 the center has been moving three kilometers east, church and all. The sun does not set here for about a month in midsummer, and does not rise for about a month in winter.

Visby

Visby was a Hanseatic port rich enough by the thirteenth century to wall itself against its own countryside, and about 3.4 kilometers of that wall still stands with some 27 towers on it. The town keeps a medieval week every August. The rest of Gotland is limestone, which is why it grows different plants from the mainland and is quarried for cement.

Luleå

Luleå is the port the Kiruna ore leaves from in summer, when the ice allows; in winter it goes to Narvik in Norway instead. Gammelstad, just inland, is a church town of 424 wooden cottages that families from outlying farms stayed in overnight when they came to Sunday service, and it has been a World Heritage Site since 1996.

Uppsala

The university here was founded in 1477 and is the oldest in the Nordic countries. Carl Linnaeus, who gave every living thing a two-part Latin name, taught in its garden from the 1740s. The cathedral is the tallest church in Scandinavia at about 119 meters, and the great mounds at Old Uppsala a few kilometers north were raised over sixth-century burials.

Jönköping

The safety match was made an industry here. Johan Edvard Lundström began production in 1845, using his brother Carl Frans Lundström and Gustaf Erik Pasch’s idea of moving the phosphorus off the match head and onto the box. At its height the factory was the largest in the world, and the buildings are now the only match museum there is.

Östersund

Östersund was founded in 1786 to give the region a market town of its own, and it faces Frösön, the island in the lake, across a bridge. Storsjön has been said since the 1630s to hold a monster, and between 1986 and 2005 that monster was formally a protected species of the county, which stopped anyone trying to catch one.

Helsingborg

The crossing to Helsingør is about four kilometers and takes twenty minutes, which for decades made it one of the busiest ferry routes in the world; Denmark is visible from the promenade. Kärnan, the square brick keep above the town, is what remains of the medieval Danish castle that guarded the strait and collected the Sound Dues.

Umeå

Umeå burned down in 1888 and was rebuilt with wide streets and some three thousand birches planted along them to stop the next fire spreading, which is where the nickname the city of birches comes from. The university opened in 1965 and holds about 35,000 students, and the city was a European Capital of Culture in 2014.

Karlstad

Karlstad sits on the delta the Klarälven has built into Vänern, and the stone bridge across its eastern branch, finished in 1811, is the longest of its kind in Sweden. The town burned in 1865 and was rebuilt on a grid of firebreaks. In 1905 the negotiations that dissolved the union between Sweden and Norway peacefully were held here.

How this one works

The other maps of Sweden

Denmark has the same map in Danish cities. India has the same map in Indian cities. Mexico has the same map in Mexican cities. United States has the same map in American cities. China has the same map in Chinese cities. Turkey has the same map in Turkish cities. France has the same map in French cities. Japan has the same map in Japanese cities. Germany has the same map in German cities. Spain has the same map in Spanish cities. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian cities. United Kingdom has the same map in British cities. Italy has the same map in Italian cities. South Korea has the same map in Korean cities. All three together on the Sweden atlas page, the country itself on the Sweden guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.