Gammelstad

As a welcome stop-over on my trip from Laponia to the High Coast, I visited Gammelstad near Lulea. It’s not a big old town or site. You have a church on a hill and Falun-red painted houses around it. Honestly, “houses” is stretching it: The old town primarily comprises sheds. And it left me wondering how poor the local farmers were that they could not afford bigger and better houses.

So after 30 minutes give or take, I finished my visit and was about to file this away as another lackluster site and quick tick. This is when I ran into the official signboard providing some much-needed background information. The sheds were not the principal homes of the proprietors. The town itself wasn’t even a real town in the sense of being the primary residence of its inhabitants. Instead, it was a church town, a place the surrounding farmers would congregate in on weekends for the Sunday sermon. I would assume they would also traded and enjoy each other’s company and plenty of drinks. I pictured the church crowd attending sermon with huge hangovers. And plenty of nightly shenanigans happening in the sheds.

There were hundreds of church towns in the past in Sweden, each owing their existence to the wide distances between each farm which prevented ordinary towns from forming. Gammelstad is the best preserved example. To this day, the locals keep the tradition of weekend stays up, although far less frequently. You may also not …

I visited this WHS in June 2018. It was a very convenient stop-over before heading further north to the Swedish Lappland. Since I was flying back to Stockholm from nearby Lulea, I decided to revisit on my way back (especially for an extra serving of Tosca Fika from Ullas cafe - thanks Els for the recommendation!).

Church towns are essentially a northern feature in Sweden. They were created due to special conditions in this part of the country. There were no sustainable reasons for bigger towns to be built until the latter part of the 17th century. Of Sweden's 71 original church towns, only 16 are left today, the majority of which have been reduced to a remnant. Gammelstad is Sweden's largest (even though still very small; it can be covered in a couple of hours) and best preserved church town with 408 cottages which have never been struck by a major fire. 

The central influence of the Church was used in economic and in political life with establishments that usually belonged to the town. The church itself, surrounded by the church town and the public buildings, is also inscribed. The Nederlulea (Lower Lulea) church is the largest medieval church in Norrland. It has some late-medieval frescoes, an altar screen which was built in Antwerp, and a very ornate pulpit inside.

People converged at Gammelstad to attend High Mass and hours of devotion, to attend markets, court sessions and parish meetings, but also to meet friends and …

The Church Town of Gammelstad is a village in the woods some 10 km outside of Lulea in North Sweden. It’s hard to imagine nowadays that people used to arrive here by boat. The sea level in the 15th and 16th century, when the town developed, was 10 meters higher than today. By 1649 though, the harbour had become too shallow. The movement of the tectonic plates had caused land elevation. On-site you can still see the spot where the old harbour was located: it now is a parking lot for the neighbouring open-air museum.

When I arrived in Gammelstad on a Sunday morning at 9 a.m. its streets were empty. Only a fat Garfield-like cat welcomed me and accompanied me on my walk around town. The trademark Falun red wooden houses give the town center a coherent architectural feel, though there are more modern houses on the outskirts of town too. I found the town layout remarkable: it seems completely haphazard. The cottages were added gradually and as needed. Once all the streets were lined with houses, the land between the roads was filled with more buildings. They now all lie very close next to or behind each other.

At first sight, the wooden houses are tiny – of course, people did not need much space for just a day in a week here. But not all houses were small: there’s also a more luxurious quarter in town. Here for example lies the mayor’s house. It is …

This is an unutterably pretty place to visit, the charming lanes of wooden houses all painted in Falu Red were complemented by a great one room museum explaining the history and importance of the settlement.

From the first time I saw a picture of this is a site I always assumed I would visit. My armchair trips always pictured it as a cold, dark and snowy place; as such my visit on a balmy hot, bright sunny summer day had already skewed my conceptions. There are several Church towns around Sweden we managed to visit three of them almost by accident on our loop of northern Sweden, however Gammelstad was by far the largest and most impressive. The higgledy-piggledy clusters and rows of red cottages all wind up hill to the central church which was another delightful surprise. I was fully expecting the usual somber plain interior however it was rather impressive with the ornate altarpiece being the highlight.

We then headed to the tourist information office and upstairs to the little museum. In only one room this place did a great job of explaining the history and importance of the settlement, this is the sort of exhibition I wish introduced every world heritage site.

We bought some ice creams and walked some more quaint rows of wooden cottages and called in to a community car boot sale (we finally discovered what all those signs for "Loppis" in Sweden were about). Feeling suitably impressed headed off to nearby Luleå for …

Getting to Gammelstad from Smedjegatan in the centre of Lulea is easy on a #9 bus, which stops at Kirkbyn, outside the Gammelstad church. There was a funeral in progress at the church when I arrived, but I got to see inside it later on after visiting some of the tiny red-painted cottages that form the church-town.