When I read guidebook's review on Oland, I was curious with their wordings "haunted beautiful", the words that in my opinion a very strange way to summarize certain place; however, I could not agree more with the wordings they chose after I saw this place. From the historic city of Kalmar, I rented a car and drove to Oland, while most of tourists turned left to the north part of the island for beach and cultural villages; I easily decided to turn right to the opposite direction where the World Heritage Sites located, the agricultural landscape of Southern Oland.

At first the flat landscape of farmland was quite Dutch nostalgic with many windmills, large red farmhouses and light forests, then the landscape changed to green hill with stonewall and many impressive standing stone of Viking tombs against the misty sky that made mystery or maybe spooky aura, a landscape that not so Swedish at all! After the strange farmland area, I was at the Stora Alvaret, a large limestone plain; the area looked very dry compared to other area on the island. The stone plain was full of dry savannah-liked grass with some bush and wildflowers, another odd landscape of this island. I continued to finish my trip at Ottenby which was the most southern spot of this island. The area was the desert landscape of peat, hundreds of mosses covered rock and Baltic Sea that were merged together into some kind of a weirdly bog wetland that was really disassociated from the rest of the island and maybe the rest of the world.

On the way backed to Kalmar, I felt that the beauty of this island started to haunt me with its many curiosities I saw. Southern Oland had its unique charm and mystery, I was not sure that this was the result of some chemistry effect from limestone and sea or not, but the air and the beam of light on the island were indescribable. Anyway, Southern Oland really surprised me; although I did not understand or comprehend the value of agricultural landscape which UNESCO used when inscribed this place, but at the end this place was one of my favorite places in Sweden, and a very enchanting World Heritage Site.