Top Reasons to Go

Tickle your taste buds. A new wave of Swedish chefs is hell-bent on putting Sweden on the culinary map—and succeeding. Industry investment, the finest raw ingredients, and a thirst for the exotic has made many of Sweden's finest kitchens competitive with the best in Europe. Dinner at Mathias Dahlgren in Stockholm’s Grand Hotel might blow your entire holiday budget, but you'll remember it for the rest of your life.

Get out there. The right to roam freely is part of the Swedish constitution, and you'd be hard-pressed to find an outdoor space not worth exploring here, from the mountains of the north to the rolling fields in the south. But you don't have to roam far if a long journey isn't in the cards; a couple of days right in Stockholm's archipelago is hard to beat.

Stay up late. There's something remarkably life-affirming about a Swedish summer night. There are northerly places throughout the world that experience obscene amounts of daylight around the summer solstice, but there's just something special about the light here from mid-June to the end of July that's hard to describe. The farther north you go, the more pronounced the effect.