A trip to Sweden has become an annual thing, usually to visit friends in Stockholm and Leksand, but this year we decided to give the second city a try, and jumped a Ryan Air flight to Gothenburg.
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| Annual Trip |
As usual we travelled en mass with a group of 8, including the little ones. City Breaks are not ideal for small kids due to the amount of hiking around you inevitably do, but we went for it anyway.
It’s a little embarrassing how great Sweden is; I mean everything works, runs on time, it’s clean and accessible. Due to the Scandinavian knack for design, it’s all pretty great to look at as well!
We rented a great apartment at
Hotell VR40, just 10 mins walk from the centre and each bagged ourselves the Gothenburg City Card top help us get around.
The City Card may seem a little pricey at 375 SEK (24h) or 525 SEK (48h), but it gets you on pretty much all the public transport, on boat trips, in to museums and lots more fun stuff. Believe us, it’s worth your money. Find out more Here.
So once we were settled in to our awesome apartment and picked up our City Cards, we hit the streets of Gothenburg to take in the sights. Expect lots of canals (it was modelled on Amsterdam) and boulevards. A historically significant seaport, the maritime influence runs through everything from food to architecture (even the opera house is designed to reflect ship hulls and sails).
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| Gotebörg Street Art |
A great way to see the city is by canal, and we used our City Card to join the
Paddan Tour which snakes through the city’s waterways, under its many bridges and even out into the sea. This is a great experience for the kids, so if you’ve got the little ones with you, strap on a life jacket and climb aboard.
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| Enjoying the Paddan Tour |
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| Sunny Gotebörg |
As usual we made a beeline for the fish market to check out the local seafood. In Gothenburg it’s a place called Feskekôrka (Fish Church – you’ll understand when you see it), where we gathered together a variety of fishy delicacies to make an awesome seafood picnic at the canal side.
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| The Famous Feskekôrka Fish Church |
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| Fishy Delicacies at Fish Church |
With bellies filled, we headed for Gothenburg’s hipster area Haga, which is a great place to chill out and stop for Fika (coffee and pastries – usually super-sweet cinnamon rolls). There are also lots of cool shops where you can blow your money on vintage clothes, high end trainers and antiques.
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| Hipster Haga |
Day 2 saw us catching the ferry out to Styrsö to check out one of Gothenburg’s many sleepy outlying islands on it's beautiful Archipelago, where the boys spent the majority of the time spotting jellyfish from the docks and harbour walls.
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| Exploring Styrsö |
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| Island Life |
On our return to the city we headed to the amazing
Universeum science centre, where you get to walk around their manmade rainforest complete with tiny monkeys swinging above your heads. This place is heaven for kids and we spent several hours inside, where the boys got to hold tropical snakes, explored the universe at the great Space exhibit and marvelled at the stunning array of sea life at the aquarium. Again our City Card got us in here, as well as the more adult
Museum of World Culture next door.
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| Universeum & Boys at Liseberg |
As if the Boys were not hyper enough by this point, Universeum just happens to be right next door to
Liseberg, Gothenburg’s superb amusement park. Whilst our City
Cards got us in for free, if you want to hit the rides and rollercoasters, you’ll need to buy a Ride Pass (SEK 195 per person). It’s well worth it though; the rides are amazing!
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| Ready for some fun at Liseberg |
We spent the bulk of our last day at
Maritiman; Gothenburg’s floating maritime museum. This is not like any museum we’ve ever been too. Maritiman comprises of 19 assorted vessels, all linked by walkways which allows you to walk through each of the ships in their fleet. The highlights for us were the hulking Småland Navy Destroyer and the Nordkaparen Submarine; boys being boys, they obviously loved the giant artillery of the Destroyer and the torpedo room of the Sub. Don’t leave Gothenburg without visiting Maritiman!
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| Ships at Maritiman |
And then it was all over. We can’t recommend Gothenburg enough, even with small kids in tow. It’s cool, it’s beautiful, the museums are superb, the locals are friendly, it’s easy to get around and the canals really set it aside from its big brother Stockholm. In fact it’s overtaken the capital as our favourite Scandinavian city!
Sorry Stockholm (we still love you), but bravo Gothenburg!
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