Götaland gathers ten of Sweden's historic provinces: Skåne, Blekinge, Halland, Småland, Öland, Gotland, Östergötland, Västergötland, Dalsland and Bohuslän. It is the most densely populated part of the country and also its most agricultural. The flat, fertile fields of Skåne have long been called Sweden's granary, while the coasts face three different waters — the Kattegat and the Öresund strait in the west and south-west, and the Baltic Sea to the east. Inland, the terrain rises into the wooded highlands of southern Sweden and closes around Vänern and Vättern, the two largest lakes in the country.
The name reaches back to the Geats (götar), and the region carries a long, layered history. For centuries its southern provinces looked to Copenhagen rather than to Stockholm: Skåne, Halland and Blekinge were Danish, and Bohuslän Norwegian, until the Treaty of Roskilde handed them to Sweden in 1658. That past still lingers in the dialects, in the food and in the stepped brick gables of Scanian farmhouses. On Gotland, the walled town of Visby — a medieval Hanseatic trading port — survives so intact that it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The eastern side of Götaland tells a different story. In Östergötland the twin cities of Linköping and Norrköping grew up side by side — one a cathedral town, the other a textile town so full of waterwheels and factory chimneys that it was nicknamed Sweden's Manchester. At the abbey town of Vadstena, on the shore of Vättern, the medieval mystic Saint Birgitta founded her religious order, and at Kalmar, guarding the sound between the mainland and Öland, the Kalmar Union that joined Sweden, Denmark and Norway under a single crown was sealed in 1397.
Götaland has a knack for turning modest resources into world-famous things. The forests of Småland became the 'Kingdom of Crystal', where glassworks such as Orrefors and Kosta still blow and cut glass by hand, and it was in the small town of Älmhult that Ingvar Kamprad opened the very first IKEA store. Those same thin soils drove one of the great dramas of the 1800s, when hundreds of thousands of Smålanders emigrated to America. On the west coast sits Gothenburg, Sweden's second city, founded in 1621 around its harbour; further south, Malmö looks across the Öresund Bridge to Denmark.
For visitors the region is remarkably varied. Öland is ringed by the Stora Alvaret, a vast limestone steppe with no equal in northern Europe, while Gotland's coasts are studded with raukar — tall pillars the sea has carved from the limestone. Bohuslän's bare granite skerries shelter Kosterhavet, Sweden's first marine national park, and the Göta Canal threads its locks across Västergötland and Östergötland, linking the North Sea to the Baltic.
The variety continues inland. In Skåne, beech woods climb the Söderåsen ridge and the headland of Kullaberg drops in cliffs into the Kattegat, while the province's rich farming has given Sweden some of its most distinctive food, from the autumn goose feasts of Mårten Gås to the tall, spit-baked spettekaka. Around Vättern, Jönköping built its fortune on safety matches, and at Växjö the descendants of emigrants return to trace their roots at the House of Emigrants.
Today Götaland has no government of its own — it is a historical and cultural region rather than an administrative unit — but the identity of its provinces, each with its own coat of arms, dialect and traditions, remains very much alive.