Sweden Guide
Gothenburg
With its long history as a trading centre, GOTHENBURG (Göteborg in Swedish, pronounced "Yur-te-boy") is a truly cosmopolitan city. Founded on its present site in the seventeenth century by Gustav Adolf, it was the last in a long line of attempts to create a trade centre free from Danish influence – Denmark had enjoyed control of Sweden's west coast since the Middle Ages, extracting extortionate tolls from all water traffic travelling into Sweden. An original medieval settlement was sited 40km up the Göta River, but was later moved to a location north of the present city in order to avoid these tolls; a third attempt was built on the island of Hisingen, but this fell to the Danes during the Battle of Kalmar in 1611. Six years later, Gustav Adolf founded a new city on the site of today's main square.
Although Gothenburg's reputation as an industrial and trading centre has been severely eroded in recent years – as evidenced by the motionless cranes in the shipyards – the British, Dutch and German traders who settled here during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries left a rich architectural and cultural inheritance. The city is graced with terraces of grand merchant houses, all carved stone, stucco and painted tiles, while the trade between Sweden and the Far East brought an Oriental influence, still visible in the chinoiserie detail on many buildings. This vital trading route was monopolized for over eighty years by the hugely successful Swedish East India Company, whose auction house, selling exotic spices, tea and fine cloth, attracted merchants from all over the world.
Today, the city remains a regular port of call for business travellers, though the flashy central hotels that accommodate them say much less about Gothenburg than the restrained opulence of the older buildings, which reflect not only the city's bygone prosperity but also the understatement of its citizens.
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