Svealand takes in six provinces: Uppland, Södermanland, Västmanland, Närke, Värmland and Dalarna. Its centre of gravity lies around Lake Mälaren, the third largest in the country, and around the capital Stockholm, which spreads across the boundary between Uppland and Södermanland. Farmland, lake systems and deep forest meet here, and the region works as a transition between the fertile south and the vast forests of the north.
It is from Svealand that Sweden takes its name. The Svear, the people of the Mälaren valley, gave rise to Svea rike, and Gamla Uppsala was a spiritual and royal centre in the Iron Age and early Middle Ages, marked by its great burial mounds. Uppsala went on to found the oldest university in the Nordic countries in 1477, and remained the country's ecclesiastical seat. To travel through Svealand is to travel through the cradle of the Swedish state.
Uppsala still wears that history openly: its cathedral is the tallest church in the Nordic countries, and it was here that Carl Linnaeus laid out the system for naming every living thing. Downstream, where Mälaren meets the Baltic, Stockholm grew from a small island town founded in the 13th century into the capital of the realm, its old quarter of Gamla Stan still following the medieval street plan. Out in Mälaren lies Birka, the Viking Age trading settlement on the island of Björkö that is now a World Heritage Site — a reminder that this inland sea was once a road to the wider world.
At the core of the region lies Bergslagen, an old mining and ironworking district that powered the national economy for centuries. The Falun copper mine in Dalarna, now a World Heritage Site, produced not only copper but also the red Falu paint that still colours Swedish cottages, while the Sala silver mine in Västmanland was once the crown's treasury. Iron, blast furnaces and mill towns left marks that still shape the landscape.
Svealand is also the heart of the image many people hold of Sweden. Dalarna, around Lake Siljan, is the country's folk-culture province — the Dala horse, the midsummer pole and the flowery kurbits painting all belong here, and the region's light and traditions drew painters such as Anders Zorn and Carl Larsson, whose homes in Mora and Sundborn are now much-loved museums. Every winter tens of thousands of skiers retrace the Vasaloppet, the long race between Sälen and Mora that recalls the flight of the future king Gustav Vasa in the 1520s. The forests of Värmland, threaded by Klarälven, the longest river in the country, shaped the writer Selma Lagerlöf, whose home Mårbacka survives as a museum. Around them rise the cities of Örebro in Närke, Västerås on Mälaren, and Karlstad on the shore of Vänern.
Beyond the towns the country softens into a patchwork of lakes and forest. At Anundshög, near Västerås, stands the largest burial mound in Sweden, ringed by stones set in the shape of ships — a monumental trace of the same early power that made this region the centre of a kingdom.
Like the other lands, Svealand today is a historical and cultural idea rather than an administrative body, yet few parts of the country hold such a dense concentration of Swedish history in so small an area.