Sundsvall Audio Tours

In June 1888, a fire started somewhere in the wooden city of Sundsvall and did not stop until most of it was ash. It was the largest urban fire in Swedish history. The town had burned before, multiple times across its history since its 1621 founding, but this time city leaders made a decision: they rebuilt in stone. The result is Stenstaden, the Stone City, a uniform neoclassical grid of sandstone and plaster that rises from the Gulf of Bothnia coast like an act of will. Walking through its streets today, you feel the confidence of a city that refused to be beaten by fire.

Sundsvall made its money from timber and pulp.

The forests of the surrounding Norrland stretched inexhaustibly inland, and mills processed the wood that built half of Europe. The workers who ran those mills went on strike in 1879 in what became a landmark moment in Swedish labor history. Today the city is northern Sweden's commercial center, home to Mid Sweden University and a cultural life that punches well above its population of 70,000. The archipelago outside the city, with its thousands of islands, is close enough to reach in an afternoon and remote enough to feel like a genuine escape.