Swedish lakes and seas, 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. Shared rivers and seas appear in one learning group, even when they cross regional boundaries.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 15 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Vänern

Vänern covers about 5,650 square kilometers, which makes it the largest lake in the European Union and the third largest in Europe. It drains southwest down the Göta river to the sea at Gothenburg, and since 1832 the Göta Canal has carried boats the other way, through Vättern and on to the Baltic. Its water level was falling by about two millimeters a year even before regulation, because the land here is still rising after the last ice age.

Vättern

Vättern is about 135 kilometers long and rarely more than 30 wide, sitting in a rift in the bedrock, and its water is cold and famously clear. It is the second largest lake in Sweden at about 1,900 square kilometers and supplies drinking water to a few hundred thousand people. Visingsö, the island near its southern end, was the seat of the Sverker kings in the twelfth century.

Mälaren

Mälaren is the third largest lake in Sweden and was an arm of the Baltic until the land rose enough to close it off, which is why it is so ragged and why Stockholm sits at its mouth. Birka, the Viking-age trading town on Björkö, and Drottningholm Palace, where the royal family lives, are both World Heritage Sites on its shores.

Hjälmaren

Hjälmaren was deliberately lowered by about 1.3 meters between 1878 and 1888, the largest land reclamation Sweden has ever done, which drained some 190 square kilometers of shallows into farmland and left the lake at around 483 square kilometers. It empties east into Mälaren through the Eskilstuna river, and Örebro stands at its western end.

Storsjön

Storsjön is the lake Jämtland is built around, about 456 square kilometers with Frösön island in the middle of it and Östersund on its eastern shore. The oldest account of a creature in it was written down in 1635. The lake freezes hard enough most winters for skate sailing, and the ice roads across it are marked and maintained.

Siljan

Siljan is round because it lies inside the ring of a crater some 52 kilometers across, left by a meteorite about 377 million years ago and the largest impact structure in Europe. The villages on its shores kept their folk dress and their midsummer poles longer than anywhere else in Sweden, and they still row to church in long wooden church boats at midsummer.

Torneträsk

Torneträsk is the sixth largest lake in Sweden and one of the deepest, at about 168 meters, and it is frozen for well over half the year. Abisko on its southern shore sits in a rain shadow that makes it one of the driest and clearest places in the country, which is why the aurora is watched from there, and the U-shaped notch of Lapporten above it was cut by glaciers.

Hornavan

Hornavan is the deepest lake in Sweden, reaching about 221 meters, and it is the top of the string of lakes the Skellefte river runs through. Arjeplog, on its shore, has a few thousand residents and rather more test drivers. Carmakers from across Europe come to prove brakes and tires on the ice here every winter.

Bolmen

Bolmen is about 184 square kilometers of shallow water and a couple of hundred islands. Since the 1980s it has supplied drinking water to much of western Skåne through the Bolmen tunnel, an eighty kilometer bore through the bedrock that took some twenty years to finish, still one of the longest tunnels in the world.

Akkajaure

Akkajaure is a reservoir rather than a natural lake. The Suorva dam holds it back, and its level moves as much as thirty meters over a year as the water is let down the Lule river through a chain of power stations. Sweden gets more than two fifths of its electricity from hydropower, and most of that comes off rivers like this one. Stora Sjöfallet, the national park it borders, lost its great waterfall to the same scheme.

Baltic Sea

The Baltic is the largest body of brackish water in the world. Something like two hundred rivers empty into it and its only way out is the narrow Danish straits, so its water is a fraction as salty as the ocean, which is why it freezes over in a hard winter. Shipworm cannot live in water that fresh, and that is why wooden wrecks survive on its floor. The Vasa sank in Stockholm harbor in 1628 and was raised nearly intact in 1961.

Gulf of Bothnia

This is the freshest and shallowest end of the Baltic, and it freezes over most winters, which is why Sweden and Finland run icebreakers to keep the northern ports open. The land around it is still rising after the last ice age, by as much as nine millimeters a year at its northern end, the fastest such rebound anywhere. The High Coast on the Swedish side is a World Heritage Site for exactly that reason.

Öresund

The Sound is about four kilometers wide at its narrowest and is one of the busiest waterways in the world. Denmark levied a toll on every ship passing through it from 1429 until 1857, collected under the guns of Kronborg at Helsingør, and it was for a long time the largest single source of Danish crown revenue. The bridge and tunnel across it opened on 1 July 2000.

Kattegat

The Kattegat is the middle room between the Baltic and the North Sea, shallow, rarely more than about eighty meters, and the place where fresh Baltic water flowing out meets salt water flowing in. That layering is part of why its deeper water loses oxygen in summer. Everything sailing between the Baltic and the Atlantic passes through here.

Skagerrak

The Skagerrak is the deep end of the passage out to the North Sea, dropping to some seven hundred meters in the Norwegian Trench, and its water is properly salty in a way the Baltic never is. The largest naval battle of the First World War was fought at its mouth in 1916, off Jutland, which is why German accounts call it the Skagerrakschlacht.

How this one works

The other maps of Sweden

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