Swedish counties, 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.

Skåne

Skåne was Danish for most of its history and became Swedish only under the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658, when Denmark gave up a third of its territory after losing the Second Northern War. It is the flattest and most heavily farmed county in Sweden, and Malmö, the third largest city in the country, sits on its western edge. Since the Öresund Bridge opened on 1 July 2000, central Copenhagen has been about half an hour away by train.

Stockholm

Stockholm grew from a fortified island at the mouth of Lake Mälaren, which is why the old town still has water on every side, and the county runs out into an archipelago of some 30,000 islands and rocks. More than a fifth of everyone in Sweden lives here, on under two percent of the country.

Gotland

Gotland is the largest island in Sweden and a county on its own, with about 61,000 people, fewer than any other county. Visby, its main town, grew rich as a Hanseatic trading port, and the 3.4 kilometer wall that still rings the center helped put it on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1995.

Norrbotten

Norrbotten is the largest Swedish county by area, close to a quarter of the country, and about one Swede in forty lives in it. Kiruna, in its north, was built in the 1890s around the largest underground iron ore mine in the world. The mine is undermining the ground the town stands on, so in 2004 it was decided to move the center three kilometers east, and that move is still under way.

Västra Götaland

Gothenburg stands at the mouth of the Göta river here, the second largest city in Sweden and the largest port in the Nordic countries. The county is younger than most of what is in it, put together in 1998 out of three older counties, which is why it is named for a region, western Götaland, rather than for a town.

Dalarna

A lot of what the world pictures when it pictures Sweden comes from here, the painted wooden Dala horse, carved at Nusnäs, and the midsummer poles and folk dress of the villages around Lake Siljan. The lake sits inside a 52 kilometer crater left by a meteorite about 377 million years ago, the largest impact structure in Europe. Falun, the county town, ran a copper mine that met as much as two thirds of European demand in the seventeenth century and is a World Heritage Site today.

Halland

Halland is a coastal shelf about 150 kilometers long and rarely more than 50 wide, and its long sand beaches make it the county Swedes drive to in July. Like Skåne it was Danish until the seventeenth century. The Grimeton radio station outside Varberg, built in 1922 to send morse across the Atlantic, still has its six 127 meter towers and is the only working transmitter of its kind left anywhere, which is why it is a World Heritage Site.

Jämtland

Jämtland was Norwegian for most of the Middle Ages and only became Swedish for good in 1645, under the Treaty of Brömsebro, which is why its dialect still sounds closer to Trøndelag than to Stockholm. Storsjön, the lake at its center, is the fifth largest in Sweden, and Östersund stands on its eastern shore. Åre, in the mountains toward the border, is the largest ski resort in the country.

Östergötland

The plain between Vättern and the Baltic here is some of the best farmland in Sweden, and the Göta Canal, cut between 1810 and 1832, crosses it to join the lake to the sea. Linköping and Norrköping sit a few dozen kilometers apart on it, one an aircraft town and the other a textile town whose mills along the Motala river are now a museum quarter. Vadstena on the lake shore holds the abbey Birgitta Birgersdotter founded in the fourteenth century.

Västerbotten

Västerbotten runs the width of the country, from the coast at Umeå to the Norwegian border, and about 275,000 people live in it. Umeå grew around a university founded in 1965 and is one of the youngest cities in Sweden by average age. The cheese named after the county has been made at Burträsk since the 1870s, and nobody has ever fully explained why it cannot be made anywhere else.

Blekinge

Blekinge is the second smallest Swedish county and was Danish until 1658, when it changed hands with Skåne and Halland. Karlskrona, its main town, was laid out as a naval base in 1680 on a group of islands, so that the Baltic fleet could stay in open water later into the winter than it could at Stockholm. The base and the town around it went on the World Heritage list in 1998.

Värmland

Klarälven, the longest river in Sweden if its Norwegian half is counted, runs the length of Värmland and empties into Vänern at Karlstad. Iron was worked in these forests from the Middle Ages and floated out on the river, and log driving carried on here until 1991, the last of it in the country. Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, was born at Mårbacka in 1858 and bought the farm back with the prize money.

How this one works

The other maps of Sweden

All three together on the Sweden atlas page, the country itself on the Sweden guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.