Swedish counties, found on the map
The twenty-one län, from Skåne at the bottom to Norrbotten at the top. Every question tells you where to look, the coast or border a county sits on or the lake it wraps around, so one you have never heard of can still be found.
21 to find, 8 a run.
3 rounds, 6 of 8 to pass each. Pass one and its places are yours.
21 counties · 3 regions
What the map tells you about each one
The paragraph the game shows when you find each one. Reading them first is not cheating.
Norrland5 on the map
- Gävleborg
- Gävleborg joins the old provinces of Gästrikland and Hälsingland and climbs from a flat coast to forested highland inland. The big timber farmhouses of Hälsingland, their rooms painted by local artists in the nineteenth century, became a World Heritage Site in 2012. In Gävle a giant straw goat has gone up for Advent every year since 1966, and someone has burned or wrecked it in most of them.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Västernorrland
- The High Coast here has risen about 285 meters since the ice sheet lifted off it, more than anywhere else on Earth, and it is still rising by about eight millimeters a year. That is why its cliffs are so tall and why old beaches lie high up in the forest, and it has been a World Heritage Site since 2000. Sundsvall, the largest town, was rebuilt in stone after the fire of 1888, the largest town fire in Swedish history.
Svealand7 on the map
- 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.
- Örebro
- In August 1810 the Riksdag met in Örebro and chose a French marshal, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, as crown prince of a country he had never lived in, and the royal family today descends from him. The castle the town grew around stands on an island in the Svartån river. The forests to the north are part of Bergslagen, where Swedish iron was mined and smelted for centuries.
- Södermanland
- In December 1317 King Birger invited his two brothers to a Christmas banquet at Nyköping Castle, had them seized that night and left them in the dungeon, where they are thought to have starved. Nyköping is still the county town. Eskilstuna grew around the forges of the smith Reinhold Rademacher in the seventeenth century and was long known as the Sheffield of Sweden.
- 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.
- Uppsala
- Uppsala University, founded in 1477, is the oldest in the Nordic countries, and Carl Linnaeus was a professor there when he set out the two-part names still given to plants and animals. Just north of the city stand the royal mounds of Gamla Uppsala, where Adam of Bremen described a pagan temple to Odin, Thor and Freyr in the eleventh century.
- 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.
- Västmanland
- At a Riksdag in Västerås in 1527 Gustav Vasa broke the power of the Catholic church, and Sweden became Lutheran. Silver came out of the mine at Sala from the fifteenth century until 1908. Västerås turned into an electrical town after a power station went up on its river in 1891 and ASEA moved its works there, and ABB, the company ASEA became, still builds industrial robots in the city.
Götaland9 on the map
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Jönköping
- The Lundström brothers started making matches in Jönköping in the 1840s, and the safety match they made here left Sweden with close to a world monopoly for decades. Up the Vättern shore at Gränna, a widow named Amalia Eriksson invented the red and white polkagris candy stick in 1859. Huskvarna, next to Jönköping, began in 1689 as a royal rifle factory and later moved on to sewing machines and chainsaws.
- Kalmar
- Erik of Pomerania was crowned at Kalmar in 1397 as king of Denmark, Sweden and Norway at once, and the Kalmar Union held the three kingdoms together until 1523. Öland is part of the county, tied to the mainland since 1972 by a bridge six kilometers long, and the stone-walled farmland of its southern half is a World Heritage Site. Orrefors and the other glassworks of the Kingdom of Crystal lie in the forests inland.
- Kronoberg
- Ingvar Kamprad was born on the farm Elmtaryd near the village of Agunnaryd here, which gave IKEA its E and A, and the first IKEA store opened in Älmhult on 28 October 1958. The Kosta glassworks, founded in 1742 by two officers of Charles XII, is in the county too. Bolmen, on its western edge, sends drinking water to much of Skåne through a tunnel 82 kilometers long.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
How this one works
How many counties are on the map?
21. Every one of them is on the map, and a run asks 8 of them. Pass a round and the places you found in it drop out of the pool, so the next run is what you have left.
What is a round?
A run of 8 questions, and 6 right passes it. 3 rounds cover the whole map, and the counter at the top of the Sweden page counts the ones behind you. Passing is what banks a round's finds: miss the mark and nothing is taken off the map, so every place that round asked about is still there to be asked again. A round is always the places you have not found yet, and when fewer than five are left it is topped up with a few you have found as review, so the last round is never one or two questions. Three quarters of it passes it.
Can I start the map over?
Yes. "Reset this map" under the counter puts all 21 back in the pool and sets the rounds to zero the moment you press it, so the whole map is there to be found again from nothing. It clears this map only; the other maps of Sweden keep their progress.
Do I need an account?
No. The game plays in the page, and a guest's progress is kept in their own browser. Signing in carries it between devices and earns XP for a run.
What happens when I get one wrong?
The map names what you actually hit, then lights up the right answer in green and tells you something about the place. Missing one is how most of this map gets learned.
The other maps of Sweden
The same map for other countries
Africa
All of Sweden’s maps together on the Sweden atlas page, the country itself on the Sweden guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.