Nationalmuseum
Sweden's royal art collection, wrested from a bankrupt queen and given to the public — now in a fully restored 1866 palace on the water.
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The building, a northern Italian Renaissance design by Friedrich August Stüler (architect of Berlin's Neues Museum), pairs an imposing closed exterior with a surprisingly spacious interior. A $132 million renovation completed in October 2018 means more of the collection is on view than ever before.
What to look for
- The grand staircase that dominates the interior and rises to the topmost galleries
- 18th-century French paintings once owned by Queen Lovisa Ulrika, surrendered to King Gustav III to settle her debts
- The facade: deliberately closed-looking from outside, which makes the open interior more of a contrast
On the peninsula Blasieholmen in central Stockholm; reopened 13 October 2018 after a five-year closure for renovation.
Nationalmuseum is one of 34 sights worth the detour in Stockholm, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Stockholm pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Stockholm
- Royal Swedish Academy of SciencesThis is the body that picks up the phone to tell physicists and chemists they've won the Nobel Prize.
- Avicii ArenaA 110-metre sphere that serves as the Sun in the world's largest scale model of the solar system — and you can walk right up to it.
- Skogskyrkogården (The Woodland Cemetery)A 1920 cemetery built on old pine-covered gravel quarries that went on to reshape how the world designs burial grounds.
- Stockholm PalaceThe same ground has held a royal residence since the 1250s — the current palace took nearly six decades to finish, outlived its architect, and the Rococo interiors are largely unchanged.
- Vasa MuseumA 64-gun warship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1628 — and is still almost entirely intact.
- Skansen150 actual Swedish buildings, shipped piece by piece to one hill — a whole country preserved before industry erased it.