Luxury Sweden Tour: Stockholm, Gothenburg and the Archipelago

Arrive into Stockholm and transfer privately to the Lydmar Hotel on Strandvägen, the waterfront boulevard that runs along the harbor. Stockholm sits across 14 islands where Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic Sea, and the relationship between the city and the water runs through every district.

Your private guide covers the city over the first day, starting in Gamla Stan, the old town that has been the center of Stockholm since the 13th century, with streets running between buildings that date from the 17th and 18th centuries and the Royal Palace at the north end of the island. From there the route continues to Södermalm, where the city’s independent restaurants, galleries and shops are concentrated around Götgatan. The Fotografiska museum on the Södermalm waterfront runs one of the strongest photography programs in the world, with a restaurant on the top floor facing the harbor.

The Vasa Museum on Djurgården houses the warship Vasa, a Swedish Navy vessel that sank on its first voyage in 1628 and was raised from the harbor floor in 1961. The museum is built around the ship and the scale of it is something photographs do not prepare you for.
On the second morning,

Do Not Disturb arranges a private boat into the Stockholm Archipelago, which stretches 60 miles out into the Baltic across around 30,000 islands. Your skipper plots a course through the quieter channels, stopping on Fjäderholmarna for lunch before the return to the harbor.

From Gothenburg, a private transfer north along the Bohuslän coast takes you to the ferry point for Klädesholmen, a small island in the outer archipelago. Salt and Sill is moored off the island, a floating hotel of 27 rooms with sea views on all sides and a restaurant that has been one of the best places to eat on the Swedish west coast for over a decade.

The Bohuslän coast is where the granite meets the sea. The islands in the outer archipelago are worn smooth by weather and water, with fishing villages that have worked the same harbors for centuries. The pace is different from both cities and the trip earns that change.

On the first full day at Salt and Sill, the hotel runs a cooking school built around the west coast seafood that comes in each morning. The classes work with the catch of the day and cover the preparation and cooking methods that have made the region’s fish restaurants some of the most visited in Scandinavia. Do Not Disturb can also arrange an evening cruise along the coast with stops at the harbor restaurants of the surrounding islands.

On the second day, a kayak tour of the Koster Marine National Park. Kosterhavet, established in 2009, was Sweden’s first marine national park and covers around 390 square kilometers of sea off the Bohuslän coast. The kayak route moves through the outer islands and skerries, with the chance to spot gray seals on the rocks and the seabird colonies that nest along the outer coast through summer.