This is a map made ahead of a trip to Sweden. The request was: "Mark the architecture, and the literary and humanities stories, worth seeing in and around Stockholm and in and around Kiruna." So the places are split into four groups: central Stockholm, around Stockholm, central Kiruna, and around Kiruna. It went up with 58 places, then grew the same day to 76, 95 and 107 (see "Additions" below). The types are architecture, literature, and humanities/history, told apart by pin color. It lives at ghmun.com/sweden.
Why two cities
Stockholm and Kiruna are 1,240 km apart and opposite in character. Stockholm is an old capital with the royal palace, the Swedish Academy and the theaters. Kiruna is a mining town that grew up around iron ore around 1900. But as I gathered the stories, a few lines connecting the two cities appeared. I kept those lines on purpose.
- Prince Eugen, the painter prince. See his paintings at Waldemarsudde in Stockholm, then see the altarpiece he painted again at Kiruna Church.
- The Sweden Solar System. Stockholm's Avicii Arena is the Sun, and the "termination shock," where the solar wind stops, is at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna. Going from Stockholm to Kiruna is going to the edge of the solar system.
- The Sámi. See the Sámi exhibits at Skansen and the Nordic Museum first, then go north to the setting of An Account of the Sámi, the first book written in Sámi by a Sámi.
- The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. The leader of the flock of geese that carries Nils is called "Akka from Kebnekaise." Kebnekaise is Sweden's highest mountain, west of Kiruna.
One story per building
For each place I added one "why" rather than a "what to see." Why the City Hall's "Blue Hall" isn't blue, why the Vasa sank 1,300 m into its maiden voyage, why Lewerentz never cut a single brick. On the literature side, I chose the places of the works before the writers' houses. The room in Strindberg's The Red Room actually existed at Berns restaurant, and Blomkvist from Millennium lives at Bellmansgatan 1. Humanities/history includes places where the buildings are ordinary but what happened was big, like the street corner where Prime Minister Palme was shot and the square where the term "Stockholm syndrome" was born.
What I corrected as of October 2026
Travel information goes stale quickly. So I looked up and checked two places separately.
- Stockholm Public Library is closed right now. Asplund's cylindrical reading room has been under renovation since 2024 and reopens in early 2028. It's marked "Closed" in the list.
- Kiruna Church has moved. In August 2025, the whole church was put on trailers and moved 5 km over two days, and it reopens in its new spot at the end of 2026. The map pin is at the new location, not the old one.
I first entered the coordinates I knew, then searched each place by name in OpenStreetMap and measured the distance (tools/sweden/check-coords.js). Most matched within 100 m. Some were wrong. Thiel Gallery and Waldemarsudde were placed 500–600 m off, in the wrong spots on Djurgården island, so I fixed them. On the other hand, for large places like the Woodland Cemetery or Kebnekaise, OpenStreetMap returns the middle of the area, so the difference ran from a few hundred meters to 3 km. For those, I didn't follow the search result and put the pin at the entrance or the summit.
The facts in the text aren't sourced place by place. Opening hours, closing days and ferries change with the seasons, so check each institution's website again before you go.
Additions: Millennium and modern architecture
After it went up, three requests came in: add more Millennium places, add Lisbeth Salander, and add famous modern and contemporary architecture. On the Kiruna side, modern architecture was really just the new city hall.
- A Millennium walk. What was one place, Blomkvist's home, became seven: Salander's old home on Lundagatan, Larsson's regular café, Blomkvist's home, the magazine's newsroom, Milton Security, Salander's Fiskargatan 9, and the pub Kvarnen. They're numbered in walking order from west to east and joined on the map with a dotted line. I used the Stockholm City Museum's Millennium map as the reference. The café Larsson went to no longer uses the name "Mellqvist" from the novel. It was renamed "Kaffebar," and the Mellqvist name is now used by a sister café in Vasastan. I learned this while researching and corrected it.
- Salander and Pippi. Larsson created Salander from the question "What if Pippi Longstocking grew up?" Her door plate, "V. Kulla," comes from Pippi's house, Villa Villekulla. So Salander's home and Lindgren's home point to each other.
- 8 modern buildings in Stockholm. The Collective House (1935), the Gröndal star houses (1946), Vällingby Centrum (1954), Kaknäs Tower (1967), the central bank (1976), Moderna Museet (1998), the KTH School of Architecture (2015), and the Norra Tornen towers (2020). They were chosen to run from functionalism through welfare-state housing and new towns, through brutalism, to today.
- 4 in Kiruna. Hallman's 1900 town plan, the old city hall (1963) demolished in 2019, Ralph Erskine's windbreak apartment block "the Long Snake" (1963) in Svappavaara, and the Treehotel and Arctic Bath in Harads. The Hallman entry includes a 2025 University of Gothenburg study finding that the relocated new city center is up to 10 degrees colder in winter than the old one. It's in because it says a plan from 100 years ago handled wind and sun better.
Additions: cafés and restaurants the locals like
The next request was "cafés or restaurants that native Swedes really recommend." I created a fourth type, "Cafés & restaurants," marked with yellow pins. 14 new places went in for Stockholm, 4 for central Kiruna and 1 for Nikkaluokta. Among existing places, the pub Kvarnen, Larsson's café, the café at Hjalmar Lundbohm's house and the Icehotel restaurant also got this type.
There were two criteria. One was to follow recommendations written by Stockholmers themselves rather than tourist-guide "best restaurant" rankings. I used locals' classic-restaurant picks published by Visit Stockholm and World of Mouth's lists of local recommendations. The other was to pick places that connect to other places on this map. Like Den Gyldene Freden, owned by the Swedish Academy, where its members gather for dinner; Tennstopet, the bar next to Lindgren's home; and the department store restaurant designed by Boberg, who built Thiel Gallery. For fika, I picked by era: the 1928 konditori Vete-Katten, Café Valand with its 1950s interior intact, and Drop Coffee, which led the new coffee culture.
Kiruna called for more care. As the town moved, restaurants closed or relocated. Café Safari, picked on review sites as "the café Kiruna people love most," didn't move to the new center and closed in 2022. Spis turned out to be closed as well. So I chose from places on Kiruna's tourist board's current list and confirmed where they're operating now through local newspapers and LKAB news. That's how Ripan Kitchen (a Sámi eight-seasons menu), Spill in the new center, Momma's, which moved along with its hotel, and Restaurang Fem got in. Ranströms, a restaurant whose 1911 building was moved whole, is said to reopen in autumn 2026, so it's not in yet.
Restaurants change faster than buildings. Be sure to check opening hours and closing days again before you go.
Additions: scenery worth a trip
The fifth type is "Nature & scenery" (green pins). The request was "places worth going to for truly stunning natural scenery." The green that humanities/history had been using went to this type, and humanities/history switched to purple.
- 5 in central Stockholm. Skinnarviksberget, the highest rocky hill downtown; Monteliusvägen, the walkway where the postcard photos are taken; Långholmen, the old prison island; Haga Park, Gustav III's landscape garden; and Hellasgården, a forest-lake sauna. The first two are right next to the Millennium walk.
- 3 around Stockholm. Tyresta National Park, with its surviving old-growth forest, and the archipelago islands of Grinda and Sandhamn. Sandhamn is the setting for Viveca Sten's crime novels, so it also got the literature type.
- 4 in Kiruna. Luossavaara, the mountain overlooking the mining town and the midnight sun; Trollsjön, Sweden's clearest lake; Abisko Canyon, 10 minutes from the station; and Laponia, Sámi land and a World Heritage Site. Stora Sjöfallet in Laponia lies inside a national park but is nearly dry because of a hydropower dam. That story is included too.
- The existing entries for Abisko, Lapporten, Kebnekaise, Torneträsk and Runmarö island also got this type.
Around the same time, I heard that "when I tap a number, some names get covered." Trying it myself in a browser: when you tap a pin, the map pans toward it, and the label of another pin that passed under the cursor pops up. Meanwhile the name of the place you actually picked wasn't visible. So the selected pin now has its label attached to the pin itself, always on top. Once the map starts moving, the hover label closes. On phones, which have no mouse, that hover label isn't used at all.
Additions: 0 to 3 stars
You can't see 107 places on a one-week trip. So the "really must-go places" were split by stars. ★★★ means go, ★★ means go if you have time, ★ means if you're interested, and no stars means see it if you're passing by. On the map, three-star pins get a yellow ring and a star mark and are a bit larger, and no-star pins are smaller. Use the "★1+ · ★2+ · ★★★" buttons above the list to filter, and the "By importance" button to re-sort with the most stars first.
There are 13 three-star places. In Stockholm: City Hall, the Woodland Cemetery, Stortorget and the Nobel Prize Museum, the Vasa Museum, the subway art, Lisbeth Salander's home, and Den Gyldene Freden. Around Stockholm: the Drottningholm Palace Theatre and Grinda island in the archipelago. In Kiruna: Kiruna Church, the LKAB mine, the Icehotel and Abisko. There were three criteria. Can you only see it in that country? Does it best show this map's stories (architecture, literature, humanities)? Can you reach it without strain on your travel route? So the closed public library, important as it is in architectural history, gets one star. Laponia and the Treehotel are wonderful, but each needs a separate day from Kiruna, so they're at one star. Among the Millennium places, Salander's home, which was specifically requested, went up to three stars. Milton Security and the newsroom, fictional places from the novel, got no stars. The stars are the judgment of whoever made this map. With different interests, you could rate them differently.
The map
The map is drawn with Leaflet. At first I used CARTO's light basemap, but now without an API key it stamps "API KEY REQUIRED" over the tiles, so I switched to OpenStreetMap tiles. The first design, a yellowed paper-map background with serif titles, was called "too old-fashioned." So I redid it.
- Basemap. Switched to Esri's gray canvas map, which needs no key. Only roads and water remain, faintly, so the colored pins stand out first. In dark mode it becomes a dark gray board.
- Floating panel. The map fills the whole screen, and the list floats over it in a translucent glass panel. When you pick a place, the map moves it to the center of the area the panel doesn't cover.
- Type and buttons. The typeface was unified as Pretendard. Area selection was split into two rows, "Stockholm · Kiruna · All" and "City · Surroundings · Both," to cut the number of buttons. Types are pill-shaped buttons with a colored dot.
- Phones. The list becomes a sheet that slides up from the bottom. Tap the handle to switch between three heights, and when you open a place, the title and filters fold away to make room for the text.
Tap the list or a pin to open its story, and use the previous/next buttons to step through places in the same group. The place name is added to the address (#vasa, #salander), so you can send a link to a single place. "Open in Google Maps" takes you straight to directions on the ground.
The place data lives in one file, sources/sweden/data.js. To add a place, add one entry to this file and run the check script once.