The city the Dutch built
Gothenburg was founded in 1621 by King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden, but it was largely built by the Dutch. Sweden needed a port on the west coast — a way to access the North Sea without sailing around Denmark, which controlled the Øresund strait and charged tolls — and the people who knew best how to build a port city in the early seventeenth century were the Dutch. So Gustav Adolf brought them in: Dutch engineers to design the canal system, Dutch merchants to run the trading houses, Dutch architects to lay out the streets.
The grid of canals in the Inom Vallgraven district — the historic center ringed by a moat — is still Dutch in its logic. The oldest church in the city, the German Church (Tyska Kyrkan) on Norra Hamngatan, was built for the German merchants. There was also a Scottish community significant enough to have its own street names. Gothenburg was cosmopolitan by design: it was built to trade, and trading cities need traders from everywhere.
Walk along the Stora Hamnkanalen — the main canal that cuts through the city center — and you're walking along a waterway that was dug by Dutch engineers in the 1620s. The moat around the Inom Vallgraven district is original seventeenth-century infrastructure. The city is four hundred years old and its skeleton is still exactly where the Dutch put it.
The East India Company
In 1731, the Swedish East India Company was founded in Gothenburg. For eighty-six years, it operated one of the most profitable trading enterprises in Scandinavian history, sending ships to Canton (Guangzhou) in China to bring back tea, porcelain, silk, and spices. The company made Gothenburg's merchant class extraordinarily wealthy. The great estates in the archipelago, the grand buildings along the canal, the art collections that ended up in the city's museums — all of it funded by trade with China.
The Svenska Ostindiska Compagniet is commemorated in the city's maritime museum, but the most vivid evidence of its existence is the Götheborg, a full-scale replica of an East India Company ship that sank in 1745 on its return from its third voyage to China — in sight of the Gothenburg harbor, where it had been greeted with celebrations. The original ship was salvaged for its cargo over several years. The replica, built over sixteen years using period-accurate construction methods, completed a voyage to China and back in 2007. It sits in the harbor now, a working tall ship you can tour, a monument to a chapter of Gothenburg's history that is simultaneously about trade and globalization and wealth and the particular drama of a ship sinking within sight of home.
The shipyards and the reinvention
If Gothenburg's seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were defined by trading companies, its nineteenth and twentieth centuries were defined by industry. The Göta älv river and the harbor made the city a natural center for shipbuilding, and by the late nineteenth century Gothenburg's yards — Eriksberg, Götaverken — were among the largest in Scandinavia. The city grew around the yards: working-class neighborhoods on the north bank of the river, bourgeois districts to the south and east. Volvo was founded here in 1927. SKF, the ball bearing manufacturer that became one of the largest companies in the world, was founded here in 1907. Gothenburg made things.
The deindustrialization hit hard. The north bank of the Göta älv — where the big yards had been — was left with empty drydocks and derelict industrial buildings. What happened next in Gothenburg is worth paying attention to: instead of letting the waterfront decay, the city spent thirty years carefully converting it. Eriksberg became a residential neighborhood. Lindholmen, where one of the largest yards had been, became a science and innovation park and university campus. The old crane tower at Eriksberg still stands at the waterfront — listed, preserved, dramatically lit at night — the way Glasgow's Finnieston crane stands: as a monument to what the city was, visible from the new things the city has become.
Hisingen — the large island on the north side of the river, connected by the Älvsborgsbron bridge — was working-class and industrial and is now in the process of the kind of mixed transformation that takes a generation to complete. The ferry across the river from Stenpiren to Lindholmen costs the same as a tram ticket and takes five minutes, and from the water you can see the scale of what the industrial city was and what the post-industrial city is becoming. Worth the five minutes.
The food, seriously
Gothenburg has more Michelin-starred restaurants per capita than any other Scandinavian city. Stockholm does not like to hear this, which is part of why Gothenburg enjoys saying it. The concentration of serious food in a mid-sized port city is explained partly by geography — the West Coast produces some of the best shellfish in Scandinavia, and proximity matters — and partly by the particular quality of Gothenburg's food culture, which is less formal and more honest than Stockholm's and has been doing serious things with local ingredients since before that was what everyone was doing.
The fish market at Feskekörka — the Fish Church, a Gothic Revival building on the Rosenlund canal that has housed a fish market since 1874 — is the most direct expression of this. The name comes from the building's resemblance to a church, which is either a joke or a statement of priorities depending on who you ask. Inside: cod, crab, langoustines, turbot, the freshest oysters you'll find at this latitude. The market also has a restaurant, and eating a fish lunch here with the canal outside the windows is one of the more satisfying meals you can have in Sweden.
Avenyn — the Champs-Élysées of Gothenburg, as locals say with some irony — is the main boulevard lined with restaurants and bars and cafes, most of them fine and none of them where Gothenburg's actual food scene lives. The interesting things are in Linné, in Haga, in the neighborhoods off the main drag where the restaurants are smaller and the menus are more considered. Gothenburg's relationship to its own food culture is modest in the Swedish way — it doesn't advertise itself loudly — which means you have to find it rather than having it presented to you.
Haga and the wooden city
The Haga neighborhood, just south of Avenyn, is Gothenburg's best-preserved nineteenth-century working-class district. The wooden buildings — low, painted in dark red and ochre, with flower boxes in the windows — feel entirely unlike the stone city around them. Haga was built for workers who couldn't afford the masonry districts, and for most of the twentieth century it was considered a slum, earmarked for demolition and redevelopment. In the 1970s, a preservation movement saved it. In the decades since, it has become the city's most charming neighborhood for exactly the reasons it was once dismissed: the scale, the texture, the sense of a city before the city got large.
Haga Nygata is the main street, lined with cafes and small shops, and it produces a particular kind of Saturday morning that Gothenburg has a genius for: unhurried, warm even when the weather isn't, organized around coffee and conversation and looking out the window. The cinnamon bun at Café Husaren, reputedly the largest in Sweden, is a test of commitment but worth attempting. Haga is the answer to anyone who assumes Gothenburg is purely a port city — it has always had this quality of human scale, of a place where people actually live their lives.
The archipelago, which is the point
Thirty minutes from the city center by ferry, the southern archipelago begins. The islands — Vrångö, Styrsö, Donsö, Brännö, Asperö, a constellation of them — are car-free. You arrive by ferry and walk or cycle. The landscape is granite and heather and the particular light of the Swedish west coast, which is not the soft light of Lisbon or the flat light of the North Sea but something in between: clear, slightly golden in the afternoon, dramatic when the weather is coming in off the Atlantic.
Gothenburg residents treat the archipelago as an extension of the city. They go in the summer to swim off the rocks, in the winter to walk the paths with the water to themselves. The ferry network is part of the city's public transit system — you can use the same card you use on the trams. This integration of the urban and the wild is one of the things Gothenburg does better than almost any other city of its size: you can be in a Michelin-starred restaurant in the city center at 7 PM and on an uninhabited island watching the sun set at 9:30 PM, and both feel entirely natural.
What you're looking at when you look at Gothenburg
Before you leave, here is the thing: Gothenburg has spent four hundred years being the city that wasn't Stockholm, and it has made something genuinely interesting out of that position. The Dutch built it for trade. The East India Company made it rich. The shipyards made it industrial and then left it to reinvent itself. What it reinvented into is a city that is confident enough in what it is to not need to perform it for you. The food is serious without being precious. The waterfront is beautiful without being theme-parked. The people are warm in the Swedish way — direct, unhurried, unimpressed by fuss. When a Göteborgare wants to describe what's wrong with Stockholm, the word they use is pretentious. When they want to describe what's right about Gothenburg, the word is lagom — just enough, not too much, exactly right. It is a Swedish word without a precise English equivalent, and it is, by design, the opposite of everything Stockholm stands for. Once you feel what lagom actually means as a lived quality rather than a concept, you feel it in the city's scale, its food, its relationship to the archipelago beside it. Gothenburg is not trying to be more than it is. That turns out to be more than most cities manage.