Gothenburg Audio Tours

King Gustavus Adolphus founded Gothenburg in 1621 as a fortified trading city on Sweden's only west coast access to the sea, the narrow strip that had been fought over with Denmark for centuries. He brought in Dutch engineers to design the canal system, which is why the city centre still has a faint Amsterdam quality to it. The port that resulted became the largest in the Nordic countries and remains so today, handling about a quarter of Sweden's total trade. Volvo, which has been making cars here since 1927, and SKF, the bearing company that supplies most of the world's industrial machinery, are the industrial inheritors of that trading tradition.

The Haga district to the south of the city centre is where Gothenburg becomes immediately likeable.

The nineteenth-century wooden houses painted in dusty colours line streets that were mostly workers' housing and are now cafes, vintage shops, and the homes of people who could afford to move there when Haga became desirable. The cafe culture here is genuinely Swedish: the largest cinnamon buns in the city are a point of local competition, and coffee with something sweet is taken seriously as a break rather than a gulp. The tram system, which cannot be built underground because the city sits on clay, runs eighty kilometres of double track above ground and is the largest such network in Scandinavia.