Explore Uppsala

Uppsala Castle is a royal castle begun under Gustav Vasa in 1549 on a ridge above the city, rebuilt in stages after the fire of 1702. The pink wings hold the residence of the governor of Uppsala County and Uppsala Art Museum, with modern and contemporary art on three floors; the gun battery on the bastion still faces the cathedral.

Uppsala Botanical Garden belongs to Uppsala University and lies directly west of Uppsala Castle, on land King Gustav III gave the university in 1787. It has a formal baroque garden, the Linneanum orangery with Mediterranean trees in winter, a tropical greenhouse with a giant water lily, a Scandinavian mountain section and a kitchen garden.

Carolina Rediviva is the main building of Uppsala University Library, built in 1820–1841 to designs by Carl Fredrik Sundvall at the top of Drottninggatan. Its exhibition hall by the entrance shows the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century Gothic gospel book written in silver ink, the Carta marina map of 1539 and changing displays from the library's collections.

Uppsala Cathedral is the seat of the Archbishop of Uppsala, a Gothic brick church begun in the 1270s and consecrated in 1435; it is 118.7 metres long and as tall. Its chapels hold the tombs of Gustav Vasa and John III, Carl Linnaeus and Emanuel Swedenborg are buried here, and the Skattkammaren treasury shows medieval textiles and royal regalia.

Gustavianum is the oldest surviving building of Uppsala University, built in 1622–1625 with funds from Gustavus Adolphus and used as the university museum since 1997. Olaus Rudbeck added the anatomical theatre under the cupola in the 1660s, and the collections include the Augsburg Art Cabinet, Egyptian antiquities and Viking Age finds.

Upplandsmuseet is the county museum of Uppsala County, housed in Akademikvarnen, a university water mill on the Fyris river completed in 1768 and in use until 1946. Its exhibitions cover the history of Uppland and the city of Uppsala, with a separate exhibition for children, and the mill's exterior appears as the bishop's house in Ingmar Bergman's film Fanny and Alexander.

The Linnaean Garden is the oldest botanical garden in Sweden, laid out by Olaus Rudbeck the Elder in 1655 and rearranged by Carl Linnaeus, who ran it from 1741. It is kept to his 18th-century plan, with more than 1,000 species grown in his sexual system, and the professor's house where he lived from 1743 is the Linnaeus Museum, with furniture and objects of the family.

Gamla Uppsala, north of central Uppsala, was a royal and religious centre of the Svear in the Iron Age. Three large burial mounds from around the 6th century rise beside a wider grave field, and the medieval stone church next to them stands where the first cathedral of Uppsala stood until the archbishop's seat moved south in 1273.

Gamla Uppsala Museum stands beside the royal mounds in Gamla Uppsala, north of central Uppsala, in a timber-clad building by the architect Carl Nyrén that opened in 2000. The ground floor tells the site's history from the Iron Age with recent excavation results, and the upper floor shows original finds from the mounds and an exhibition on the runestones of Uppland.

Linnaeus's Hammarby is the 18th-century farm that Carl Linnaeus bought in 1758 as a summer home, in the countryside about 10 km south-east of central Uppsala. The red log houses keep the family's rooms, shown on guided tours, the park grows plants Linnaeus himself cultivated, and the surrounding cultural reserve with walking paths is open all year.