Uppsala audiotours

Uppsala has been the intellectual capital of Sweden for five centuries. The university founded here in 1477 is the oldest in Scandinavia, and its presence still shapes everything from the color of the buildings to the rhythm of the academic year. In May, students in white graduation caps flood the banks of the Fyris River, a ritual unchanged in its joy since the 19th century.

The Gothic cathedral rising over the city center is the tallest church in Scandinavia, its twin spires visible from the Viking burial mounds at Gamla Uppsala just three kilometers to the north.

Those mounds, royal graves from the 5th and 6th centuries, hold the remains of Svear kings and connect the city to a pre-Christian past older than the university by nearly a thousand years. Carl Linnaeus, who devised the system for naming all life on Earth, designed his botanical garden here in the 1740s and is buried in the cathedral nave.