The biggest mistake safari travellers make isn’t forgetting insect repellent or packing the wrong shoes. It’s bringing too much.
Unlike many holidays, safari life is wonderfully uncomplicated. Days are spent outdoors, moving between game drives, meals and time at camp. There is little need for formal clothing or multiple outfit changes. Instead, focus on packing for changing temperatures, travelling light and prioritising comfort.
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Midsummer, held on the Saturday closest to the solstice, is the one fixed point in the Swedish calendar that almost everyone builds their summer around. Stockholm holds its own celebrations, but the tradition feels most intact in villages like Leksand and Rättvik in Dalarna, where communities still gather around a flower-covered maypole from midday, dancing the same children’s songs, Små grodorna among them, that have accompanied the ritual for generations. With the right introduction, it’s possible to join a smaller family gathering rather than one of the larger public events: a lakeside lunch of new potatoes, pickled herring and strawberries, followed by an evening that barely seems to darken at all.
Image by Per Bifrost/imagebank.sweden.se
Beyond Stockholm’s 14 islands lies a genuinely different scale of water: an archipelago of around 30,000 islands, skerries and bare granite rocks stretching out into the Baltic. Through June and July, island hotels reopen and Stockholmers decamp for long weekends, and a private boat and skipper mean the day goes wherever the weather and your mood decide, stopping to swim off a rock most visitors never find, or pulling in for lunch at whichever harbour looks quietest. Sandhamn, on the outer edge, is the best known of these harbours, and during Gotland Runt, a roughly 365-nautical-mile race around the island of Gotland, its jetties crowd with returning yachts and the whole village stays up later than usual for a few days.
Image by Simon Paulin/imagebank.sweden.se
Båstad has hosted a tennis tournament on the same seaside clay courts for decades, close enough to the harbour that spectators drift between matches and lunch without much of a walk. Further along the coast, the Falsterbo Horse Show pairs showjumping and dressage with evenings by the sea, on a peninsula that also happens to be one of Europe’s most important stopover points for migrating birds each autumn. Both sit within easy reach of Skåne, where the cooking runs on what’s been grown, caught or foraged that morning, and a stay at a country manor between fixtures tends to mean mornings that start late and lunches that refuse to end on time.
Dalhalla stages its summer concert programme inside a disused limestone quarry in Dalarna as August’s evenings start drawing in, the rock walls doing the work of an amphitheatre. Crayfish parties follow soon after: tables laid outdoors under paper lanterns printed with moon faces, bibs tied on, and singing between glasses of snaps that carries on long after the crayfish themselves are gone. Across the Baltic, Gotland’s walled town of Visby, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, opens onto farmland, fishing villages and limestone sea stacks best reached by bicycle, with the quieter island of Fårö a short ferry beyond it.
Image by Henrik Trygg/imagebank.sweden.se
None of these places work quite the same way twice, and trying to force one visit to cover all of them usually means enjoying none of them properly. A shorter trip might stay close to Stockholm and its archipelago. A longer one could open with Midsummer in Dalarna and close on Gotland, or run the length of the southern coast chasing Båstad and Falsterbo between long lunches in Skåne. What holds it together is a way of spending summer that Swedes have never much needed to explain to each other: outdoors, close to the water, and rarely checking the time.
Our Travel Designers track village Midsummer gatherings, archipelago charters and event dates that shift from one year to the next, so a journey through the season can be built around exactly the places that matter to you.
Speak to one of our Travel Designers to start planning your Swedish summer.
