At Gripsholm Castle — a Renaissance fortress shimmering across Lake Mälaren, founded by King Gustav Vasa in 1537 — there is a lion. It was the first lion ever seen in Sweden, presented as a gift to the Swedish court in the 18th century, and when it died the court did what any sensible 18th century institution would do: they had it stuffed.
The problem was that the taxidermists had never seen a lion before. They had only the pelt and their imagination to work from. The result is an animal of extraordinary character — legs too long, face too flat, an expression of mild indignation that may or may not be intentional — that has become one of Gripsholm’s most beloved exhibits. It sits in the castle looking out at visitors who laugh, photograph it, and understand immediately that they are in a place with both an extraordinary history and a healthy sense of humour about itself.
We came to Sörmland wondering if it could rival the Roslagen archipelago region we had visited the week before. We left with our answer. Read on.
What and Where is Sörmland?
Sörmland — Södermanland in full — is the region immediately south of Stockholm, stretching from the shores of Lake Mälaren on the north and west to the Baltic Sea coast on the south and east. The closest point is 50 minutes by train from Stockholm Central; the furthest reaches of the region are a comfortable two-hour drive.
It is not a region that appears on most international visitors’ Sweden itineraries, which is precisely the point. While the crowds work their way through Gamla Stan and queue for the Vasa Museum, Sörmland’s 400 manor houses and castles, its lake towns and coastal settlements, its ancient inns and extraordinary private collections sit largely undisturbed by international tourism.
Sörmland is known for:
- Over 400 manor houses and castles — the highest concentration in Sweden
- Gripsholm Castle — named one of Europe’s top 50 castles, housing the National Portrait Gallery of Sweden
- The oldest inn in Sweden, dating to 1609, built on the foundations of a Carthusian monastery
- The largest collection of vintage jukeboxes in Europe — at a castle, naturally
- A culinary tradition that draws from the region’s lakes, forests, and game
- Runestones, Viking heritage, and medieval cathedral towns
- Stendorren Nature Reserve and some of Sweden’s most accessible archipelago scenery
- Moose. In their natural environment. At sunset.
Getting to Sörmland and Getting Around
By train from Stockholm: Swedish Rail connects Stockholm Central to Strängnäs and Mariefred (approximately 50–70 minutes) and to Nyköping on the Baltic coast (approximately 60 minutes). The trains are comfortable, punctual, and inexpensive. For a visit focused on the lake towns of western Sörmland — Strängnäs, Mariefred, and Gripsholm Castle — the train is entirely sufficient.
By hire car: For the full Sörmland experience — covering Sparreholm Castle, Julita Manor, Öster Malma, and the inland areas between the lake towns — a hire car is significantly more practical. The region’s best experiences are spread across an area of approximately 100km north to south, and public transport connections between the interior destinations are limited.
Suggested route by car from Stockholm: Stockholm → Strängnäs (1 hour west) → Mariefred/Gripsholm (30 minutes south) → Sparreholm (30 minutes south) → Julita Manor (40 minutes west) → Nyköping (1 hour south) → Stockholm via E4 motorway (1.5 hours north)
This loop covers the region’s highlights in two to three days without doubling back.
The Towns of Sörmland
Strängnäs: Lina, the Windmill, and the Cathedral
We arrived in Strängnäs and were met by Lina — a Strängnäs Greeter. The Greeter programme is one of Sweden’s finest and least-known tourism initiatives: local volunteers who offer to show visitors around their town for free, sharing the history and the places they love with genuine personal enthusiasm. Lina was passionate about her town in the way that people are passionate about places they have chosen to understand deeply, and her tour made us feel we were seeing Strängnäs through the eyes of someone for whom it was still surprising.
She took us up to the 1855 windmill on the hill above the harbour — still in working condition, still turning, giving a panoramic view over the lake and the rooftops of the town. Then to the Cathedral, which dates to the 13th century and carries the weight of its history physically — this is where King Gustav Vasa delivered his first public speech, on the northern side of the building, in an address that changed the course of Swedish history. Standing where he stood, looking out over the same lake, gives the Cathedral a connection to the living past that most museum exhibits cannot replicate.
The Cathedral also contains one of the finest medieval interiors in Sweden — carved choir stalls, vaulted ceilings, and the tomb of King Karl Knutsson Bonde, who was King of Sweden three separate times in the 15th century, which was apparently not unusual.
For fika in Strängnäs: Café Gräsagården — Lina took us there and it was excellent. Sourdough bread, pastries, the particular quality of Swedish coffee that makes you understand why Swedes drink so much of it.
The Greeter Programme: Free, bookable through the Visit Strängnäs website. Request in advance — Greeters are volunteers and availability varies. One of the best free experiences in the entire Sörmland region.
Mariefred and Gripsholm Castle
Mariefred is a small town of painted wooden houses on the shore of Lake Mälaren, with Gripsholm Castle sitting on its own island across the water in a composition that looks staged and isn’t. The town exists in a comfortable relationship with its famous neighbour — not overwhelmed by it, not indifferent to it, simply oriented toward the lake and the castle in the way that seems entirely natural after five centuries of coexistence.
Korvmoj with a royal view: Before visiting the castle we stopped at Gripsholmsgrillen — a classic hot dog stand on the lake shore. Even for vegetarians, the sweet potato fries and three varieties of sauce, eaten at a waterfront table with Gripsholm Castle directly across the water, constituted one of the more unexpectedly satisfying lunch experiences of the trip. Local Sörmland artisan beers completed the scene. Some things are better than they have any right to be.
Gripsholm Castle was begun by King Gustav Vasa in 1537 on the site of an earlier fortress, and the building that resulted is one of the finest Renaissance castles in Scandinavia — round towers, red brick, the particular gravity of a building that has housed royal ambition, imprisonment, abdication, and artistic patronage across five centuries.
The stuffed lion we mentioned at the opening is real and worth seeking out. So is the 18th century theatre — one of the best-preserved in Europe, its stage and seating intact, the acoustics suggesting the music and conversation that once filled it. We sat in the theatre for several minutes and felt the past in the specific way that only genuinely preserved spaces allow.
Since 1822, Gripsholm has housed the National Portrait Gallery of Sweden — over 4,000 portraits spanning six centuries of Swedish history, covering the chambers and galleries of the castle in a way that makes the history personal. The portraits of successive monarchs, their courts, their artists, and occasionally their enemies give the castle’s history human faces.
The grounds, the moat, and the runestones in the castle gardens complete an experience that warrants three to four hours minimum.
Nyköping: The Banquet, the Brothers, and the Key
Nyköping sits on the Baltic coast, an hour south of Stockholm, and is one of those Swedish towns that carries its history in its streets without making a performance of it.
As you walk through the town centre you’ll notice something unusual: images of keys — in garden ornaments, in stone carvings, worked into various decorative contexts. The explanation dates to 1317. King Birger of Sweden invited his two brothers, Erik and Valdemar, to a banquet at Nyköping Castle. After years of power struggle, he had them arrested at the feast, imprisoned in the castle dungeon, and threw the key into the river. The brothers starved to death. The key, apparently, was fished out of the same river by a young boy centuries later. Whether this is the actual key or an extraordinary coincidence is a question Nyköping has wisely decided not to resolve definitively.
The castle ruins above the town are worth an hour. The waterfront — Nyköping sits where the Nyköping River meets the Baltic — is attractive and busy in summer.
Öster Malma Castle, just outside Nyköping, is one of Sörmland’s most rewarding experiences. A baroque castle built in the 1660s, it now operates as a wildlife and hunting heritage centre with a restaurant serving regional cuisine sourced from its own game estate, lakes, and gardens. The trophy room — walls covered with centuries of deer antlers, the cumulative record of hunting practices that evolved significantly over time — is properly explained by staff who contextualise the history honestly rather than defensively.
The highlight of our visit was watching moose in their natural environment at sunset. Moose are larger than you expect — significantly larger — and watching them move through the forest edge in the long Scandinavian evening light, unhurried and entirely indifferent to our presence, was one of those wildlife moments that requires no enhancement or interpretation. We also watched deer in the open ground below the castle and various birds in the wetlands. Sörmland’s wildlife tourism is seriously underrated.
The restaurant at Öster Malma deserves particular mention — vegetarians are well catered for alongside the game-based menu, and the sourcing from the surrounding estate gives the food a specificity and freshness that restaurant supply chains rarely match.
The Castles and Manors
Sparreholm Castle: The Collection That Grew Beyond All Reason
If you had a castle with spare outbuildings and unlimited passion for collecting things, what would you collect?
Helge Karinen collected everything.
Sparreholm Castle — a 1562 estate in the Sörmland countryside — became the repository for what is now one of Europe’s most extraordinary private collections. We will describe what we found there and trust that you will make the journey.
The cars: Sparreholm houses one of Europe’s leading collections of vintage automobiles, tracing the development of the automobile from the 1800s onwards. Not a curated selection of highlights but a comprehensive archive — vehicle after vehicle charting the evolution of what was once a miracle technology into an everyday object. We were not car enthusiasts before we visited Sparreholm. We left having spent considerably longer in the collection than planned.
Among the cars is a 1936 Mercedes 540K that was owned by Prince Gustaf Adolf — the father of the current King of Sweden. Standing beside a car that belonged to the grandfather of the reigning monarch, in a private castle in the Swedish countryside, is one of those experiences that only slow travel in Europe delivers.
The jukeboxes: Sparreholm houses the largest collection of jukeboxes in Europe. Over 100 of them, spanning the history of the form from the earliest music boxes and phonographs through gramophones to the great American jukeboxes of the mid-20th century. Every one is different. Every one is playable. The assumption that jukeboxes were all essentially the same is one that approximately fifteen minutes in this room will correct permanently.
The vintage bicycles: A collection of historic bicycles running alongside the automobile collection — the parallel development of two-wheeled and four-wheeled personal transport, side by side, makes the history of mobility unexpectedly compelling.
For families: The current owner’s children grew up running through these grounds, sitting in vintage cars, riding Lusitano horses, and playing music on jukeboxes. The castle offers equestrian experiences including dressage on Lusitano horses in their equine centre, alongside the collections. Seasonal accommodation is available in summer for those who want to spend a night on the estate.
Gripsholm Castle
Covered in detail in the Mariefred section above. Allow three to four hours.
Julita Manor: Picnic Fika and Two Hundred and Ninety Apple Trees
Between Katrineholm and Eskilstuna, on the shores of Lake Oljaren, Julita Manor is Sweden’s largest open-air museum — a 2,200-hectare estate donated to the Nordiska Museet in 1941 by Arthur Bäckström, who specified that it should provide “future generations with a faithful representation of what a large old Södermanland estate looked like at the end of the previous century.”
The estate takes that mandate seriously. The manor house, the stables, the carriage houses, the dairy, the windmills, the labourers’ dwellings — all preserved and accessible. Over 290 apple trees in the orchard. A working estate rather than a display of one.
Our treat was a picnic fika on the verandah of the Manor House overlooking the manicured gardens — apple cider from the estate’s own orchard, estate-made cheeses, pastries and homemade cakes that rewarded the afternoon’s exploration with the kind of civilised pause that the Swedish fika tradition was designed for. We went back for seconds on the pastries. There was no reason not to.
Three walking trails are available, each taking approximately 45 minutes: the Julita Abbey trail, The Gentry and Their Servants trail, and The Gardens trail. Allow a full day. There is a cafe and a garden shop. Accommodation with lake views is available for those who want to stay overnight on the estate.
Nynas Manor House
A tour that starts in the basement servant’s quarters and winds upward through the house to the attic — a journey through the entire social hierarchy of a Swedish manor, floor by floor, decade by decade. The best-preserved late 17th century stucco ceilings in Sweden are on the upper floors. The attic contains a discovery we won’t reveal here — it’s better experienced than described, and it provides an excellent incentive for getting children through the lower floors.
Öster Malma Castle
Covered in the Nyköping section above. The wildlife at sunset is the reason to visit; the restaurant and the castle interior are the reasons to stay longer.
Where to Stay: Two Extraordinary Properties
Gripsholms Värdshus, Mariefred — The Oldest Inn in Sweden
Gripsholms Värdshus dates to 1609 — four hundred and sixteen years of continuous hospitality in the same building, on the foundations of a Carthusian monastery that preceded it. It is the oldest inn in Sweden and it has been feeding and sheltering travellers since Shakespeare was alive.
Our room was beautiful — genuinely beautiful, with the quality of furnishing and bedding that a property achieves when it has been caring about guest comfort for four centuries and knows exactly what works. We did not want to leave the next morning.
Dinner at the inn offers a choice of fine dining, classic Swedish fare, and English pub-style food — all with views over the lake to Gripsholm Castle, which at sunset turns the colour of old brick. Breakfast the next morning was a Swedish buffet of such quality that lingering over it was the only appropriate response — bread, meats, cheeses, eggs, pastries, yoghurt, fruit, and coffee that justified staying at the table until the last possible moment before checkout.
The inn has three very different dining environments, all with lake views. Book dinner in advance in peak season.
Sunlight Hotel, Nyköping — A Night in a Soap Factory
The Sunlight Hotel occupies a former factory that produced Sunlight soap in the early 20th century — an industrial building converted into a luxury hotel and conference centre with a spa, an impressively equipped gym, and a conference floor where classic cars are displayed for guests to examine, touch, and occasionally sit in.
The rooms are very comfortable. The breakfast buffet is substantial. The entire experience of sleeping in what was once an industrial soap production facility — in rooms that are now warm, beautifully designed, and entirely devoid of soap-manufacturing associations — is one of those accommodation experiences that rewards explaining to people who weren’t there.
We felt like royalty. It would be dishonest not to say so.
Food and Drink in Sörmland
Sörmland is a serious culinary region — something the Swedes know and international visitors rarely discover before they arrive. The combination of game from the region’s forests and hunting estates, fish from its lakes and Baltic coastline, dairy from its farms, and produce from estates like Julita creates a regional food identity that is genuinely distinct from the more international dining scene of Stockholm.
Gripsholmsgrillen, Mariefred — the hot dog stand with the castle view. Do not dismiss this. The sweet potato fries and local artisan beer with Gripsholm Castle across the water is an experience that costs very little and delivers disproportionately.
Rogge Bakery, Strängnäs — attached to the Hotel Rogge, the bakery is well-known locally for its sourdough, artisan breads, salads, and fika pastries. The quality of the bread alone justifies a detour.
Öster Malma restaurant, Nyköping — regional cuisine sourced from the castle’s own estate. Excellent food with genuine provenance, well-priced relative to the quality, with vegetarian options that take the same sourcing approach as the game-based dishes.
Gripsholms Värdshus, Mariefred — the full range from fine dining to classic Swedish fare, always with lake and castle views. The breakfast buffet alone makes staying here worthwhile.
Julita Manor café — estate apple cider, estate cheeses, homemade cakes. Seasonal but exceptional.
Fika everywhere: The Swedish fika pause — mid-morning and afternoon coffee and pastry — is observed seriously in Sörmland. Every town has its café. Every café has its kanelbulle. Stop for fika. Accept it as part of the rhythm of the day. Your waistline may suffer; your experience of Sweden will be significantly enhanced.
The Verdict: Did Sörmland Rival Roslagen?
We set ourselves a challenge at the start of this trip: could Sörmland rival the Roslagen archipelago region where we had spent the two days before?
The answer is that they are not rivals. They are different expressions of the same country — Roslagen gives you Sweden’s relationship with the sea and its military history, carved into islands and fortresses over four centuries. Sörmland gives you Sweden’s relationship with the land — the manor houses and castles, the hunting estates and orchard gardens, the lake towns and their cathedral histories, the extraordinary private collections that accumulate when a family has had a castle and several outbuildings since 1562 and a passion for acquiring things.
Both regions are what you get when you step back from Stockholm and allow Sweden to show you what it actually is, away from the international tourism circuit.
The moose at sunset at Öster Malma. The picnic fika on the Julita Manor verandah. Lina showing us the windmill above Strängnäs harbour. The 1936 royal Mercedes. One hundred and seventeen jukeboxes. The oldest inn in Sweden and a breakfast we still think about.
Sörmland won. We think.
With thanks to Visit Sweden, Visit Sörmland, and Swedish Rail for hosting this visit. As always, our opinions are our own.
Practical Information
Getting there: Swedish Rail from Stockholm Central to Strängnäs (50 minutes) and Nyköping (60 minutes). Mariefred accessible by rail or by historic steamboat from Stockholm in summer. Hire a car recommended for full coverage of the region.
How long: Two nights minimum; three nights to cover the region properly without rushing.
When to go: May to September for the full experience — manor houses, estates, and outdoor attractions are fully open.
July and August are the busiest. September is excellent — quieter, with the first hints of autumn colour in the forests.
October and November bring dramatic landscapes and smaller crowds; check individual property opening hours as some seasonal venues close.
Currency: Swedish Krona (SEK). Cards are accepted virtually everywhere.
Language: Swedish; English spoken to an excellent standard throughout the region.
Quick Reference
Don’t miss: Gripsholm Castle (stuffed lion essential), Sparreholm Castle collections (jukeboxes, vintage cars), Strängnäs Greeter tour with Lina, Julita Manor picnic fika, moose at Öster Malma, Nyköping dungeon key story
Stay: Gripsholms Värdshus Mariefred (oldest inn in Sweden, lake views), Sunlight Hotel Nyköping (converted soap factory, classic cars on the conference floor)
Eat: Gripsholmsgrillen (korvmoj with castle views), Rogge Bakery Strängnäs (sourdough and fika), Öster Malma restaurant (estate sourcing, game and vegetarian), Gripsholms Värdshus dinner (lake views, classic Swedish fare)
Getting around: Train for Strängnäs/Mariefred/Nyköping; hire a car for Sparreholm, Julita, and Öster Malma
Book in advance: Strängnäs Greeter (request through Visit Strängnäs), Gripsholms Värdshus dinner, Julita Manor guided tours
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Since 1822 Gripsholm has housed the National Portrait Gallery of Sweden.
Read more about Sparreholm Castle here
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I never visited here but after reading this i want to go there.
Thanks for sharing this with us.
I really appreciate your work.
Thanks for your comments.
Sörmland looks like a dream destination in Sweden! The combination of scenic nature, charming towns, and rich history makes it a perfect getaway. Your guide is so inspiring!
Sormland was one of the most beautiful press trips we ever took and Gripsholm castle was my favorite one on that trip.
I totally agree with you. We had the pleasure of meeting you both in Sormland. It was a great travel conference with TBEX.