Forest, water and a very long north
North of the Arctic Circle the sun stays up through part of the summer and down through part of the winter. Forest and woodland cover almost 70 percent of the land, and the map is scattered with about 95,700 lakes. People have gathered in the south. Norrland, which takes up almost 60 percent of the country, is thinly settled, and the big towns all lie in the southern half.
The far north also keeps a small record of melting ice. Kebnekaise, the highest mountain, has two summits, and the southern one wears a glacier that has been shrinking. When Stockholm University researchers measured it in 2021 it stood at 2,094.6 metres, about two metres below its northern neighbour.
The great power that stepped back
In 1520 Christian II of Denmark staged a mass execution known as the Stockholm Bloodbath, and three years later Gustav Vasa took the Swedish throne, using the Reformation to curb the Church and establish Lutheranism. In the following century Sweden became a great power by taking control of the Baltic region.
Decline came through Russia, with defeat at Poltava in 1709 and the loss of Finland in 1809. An invasion of Norway in 1814 was the last war Sweden fought on its own account. Emigration was a quieter loss. Between 1851 and 1910 about 1.17 million people left a land that had held roughly 3.5 million in 1850, and four in five of them went to the United States.
Neutrality in the Second World War was less tidy than the word suggests. After Germany occupied Denmark and Norway, Sweden agreed in June 1940 to let German soldiers cross its territory, and in the early war years it supplied 40 percent of Germany's iron ore. In October 1943 it also took in more than 7,000 Jews fleeing Denmark. More than 200 years of staying outside military alliances ended after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when Sweden applied to join NATO in May 2022. It became a member in March 2024.
The Sami and the taking of the north
The Sami, the Indigenous people of the north, have lived there for at least 1,500 years. An estimated 20,000 to 35,000 live in Sweden today, though the true number is unknown because the census does not record ethnicity. A decree of 1673 encouraged settlers into their lands, which were treated as almost vacant. From the 1910s the rivers of Sami country were harnessed for hydropower, and the researcher Åsa Össbo argues that, forestry aside, no venture in Swedish colonial history has devastated as much Sami land.
The treatment of the people themselves was just as harsh. In 1922 Sweden founded an Institute for Race Biology, which examined Sami for its eugenics research, and remains collected for such work are still held by museums and institutions. Sami children were taken from their families and sent to nomad schools and boarding schools. The Church of Sweden helped to run those schools, and it has since apologised, admitting that it contributed to and legitimised oppression.
Recognition has come slowly. Parliament acknowledged the Sami as an Indigenous people in 1977, and a Sami Parliament based in Kiruna was inaugurated in 1993, though it cannot overrule the national parliament or local councils. Reindeer herding remains a right reserved for people of Sami heritage who belong to a Sami village, across roughly half of Sweden's land, and about 2,500 people depend on it directly. In January 2020 the Supreme Court unanimously restored the exclusive hunting and fishing rights of the Girjas community, which the state had ended in 1993. A truth commission set up by the government in 2021 delivered its final report on 30 September 2026.
Iron, leave days and the open woods
Sweden today is a country of arrivals as well as departures: in 2024 a quarter of people aged 16 to 65 had been born abroad. Timber, hydropower and iron ore built its export economy, and engineering firms such as Ericsson and SKF grew out of that base, joined later by names like IKEA and Spotify. In 2023 hydropower, nuclear and wind were the three largest sources of electricity, and fossil fuels supplied a fraction of one percent.
Kiruna shows what that wealth can cost. Subsidence from the iron mine of the company LKAB is forcing part of the town eastwards, about 6,000 people in all. Sami herders say the fragmenting of their land makes their way of life ever harder.
Parents share 480 days of paid leave for each child, with 90 income-based days reserved for each parent. Voters rejected the euro in 2003, so the krona remains. Shootings have more than halved since 2022, and homicides fell to 84 in 2025, the lowest level since 2012.
Everyday pleasures are simpler. Colleagues stop for fika, a coffee break that is often more about the company than the coffee. And since 1994 the constitution has promised everyone access to nature under allemansrätten, which lets people walk, camp and pick berries on most land, provided they disturb nothing and destroy nothing. In a country this full of trees, that promise reaches a long way.
