Without my native guide (read: best friend from school who moved there last spring), I would have totally overlooked Skansen. It was certainly mentioned in my guidebook but it wouldn’t have caught my attention and even if it had, I probably wouldn’t have gone there. But Esther, who has three children under ten, has a family card and three children who enjoy Skansen’s various delights, and after two days of dithering between Skansen and the local national park, settled on central Stockholm.
It was a bit of an adventure getting there. We took the commuter train from her house in the suburbs to Stockholm City (the mainline station on the surface may be Stockholm C; the commuter station three levels down is Stockholm City, much to my confusion on arrival from the airport by commuter train), the blue line metro to Kungsträdgården and from there, because it came quicker than the tram, a bus to a TV tower, much to our bemusement. The bus doesn’t actually go to Skansen. So we went back a few stops, to the Djurgården bridge and took the tram from there.
Djurgården is one of Stockholm’s bigger islands. Its name means “game park”, I think but other than Skansen, it’s not particularly wild anymore. It’s home to Sweden’s oldest amusement park, several good and also several mediocre museums and probably a lot else that I didn’t see.
Skansen is an open-air museum. The majority of it is a wooded hill, filled with various historic buildings from throughout Scandinavia, Finland and so on. Some have been moved here whole; some have been disassembled and rebuilt. It’s all very interesting – living history and so on. But what Esther and her kids go for, and what I was going for, was the animals.
The entire west side of this place is a big zoo and most of its inhabitants are Nordic animals.
Esther’s favourite was first – an aviary where little Nordic songbirds twitter around your head. It takes a moment to spot them among the leaves and branches and it takes even longer to realise there’s food everywhere. How do you miss an entire pear nailed to the tree? The aviary is great because it’s warm – I had seriously underestimated the Swedish winter, thinking that by mid-March it’d be mostly over.
Of the outside animals, the first we spotted were three huge hairy spotted pigs. The most impressive was the wolf, roaming a big sunken habitat, climbing on rocks, ignoring the tasty rooks that prowled its woods.
But the wolf got overshadowed by the common everyday city wildlife. Sweden’s squirrels are red. British squirrels are grey, apart from a few rare and special colonies of reds. I see tourists in Green Park in London cooing over the squirrels and I just shake my head because I see squirrels every day at work. But here we were, doing the tourist thing over the red squirrels. They’re pretty tame – not enough to be touched but a non-threatening kid can, if they’re lucky, hand feed them a piece of biscuit and they definitely don’t mind dancing around you while you take photos.
Opposite the wolf (“Ulv!” “Varg!”) was a wolverine, although we didn’t spot it. Mostly because we didn’t really stop long enough. We were coming up on a pair of wild boar with month-old piglets. I try not to think about the possibility of meeting a wild boar out in the wild but the piglets are adorable. They’re furry and stripy and they have such cute little faces. They share their home with a few bison.
As we headed towards the next animals, we met a small flock of sheep being coaxed through the grounds with the promise of a bucket of food and at this point, four-year-old William suddenly urgently needed the toilet and I was left to amble on and catch up with them. So I went to see the lynx. I can’t get over the fact that these things live wild in Europe – or at least in the wilder parts of Northern Europe. They’re little leopards! With huge feet! This one roamed the same circle over and over again, which meant I could get my camera in position ready for when it came back.
I missed the brown bears – not for want of trying, but it was March and they were still hibernating for another couple of weeks. Opposite were some horses, including the most spectacular ginger one, gleaming red-gold in the sun. Opposite was another aviary, this one containing an owl I couldn’t spot and a woodpecker, busily making a hole in the tree, its head vibrating far too fast to get a non-blurry picture of it.
We were nearly at the moose but first, some otters. They didn’t seem to mind the cold. Most of their river was frozen but they quite happily dived below the ice and played and rolled in the sun. Next door were harbour seals – well, their lake was next door. No sign of any seals there, though.
And then the moose! Three moose, actually. They’re big old beasties, which I knew, because I’ve seen hoofprints in the snow in the Arctic but I’ve not seen one close up. These ones were all lying down in the sun so you still can’t really grasp the scale of them but their heads are enormous.
From behind the moose enclosure, you could see out over Stockholm. I didn’t – and still don’t – know the city well enough to pick out any landmarks but it’s quite a thing, staring out over a major capital city beside a frozen river with three moose six feet behind you.
William’s second-favourite was next – the reindeer. They’re cute, they look well looked after, they were gleaming and a sort of golden-blonde colour and happily nibbling hay. And again, with Stockholm in the background.
If you listen carefully when reindeer walk, their legs click. It’s so other reindeer know, out in the wild, that it’s a reindeer approaching and not a predator.
Our last major stop was at the mini zoo. I’d been led to believe it was a petting zoo but you can’t actually get your hands on any of the animals. These are more petting-esque animals, though. One corner is made up to be a little living room with cats living in, a kind of living advert for cat adoption – literally. There are certificates up on the wall, cats looking for new homes. There are rabbits and guinea pigs and chickens and rats and mice. I’d very fond of the rats. They’re big and sleek and smart and their feeding bowl is designed to look like a disgusting overflowing bin. It’s actually not very appetising to look at.
After that, Esther had to head home to pick the older kids up from school and I stayed behind to prowl Skansen a bit longer. I was hungry by now – verging on hangry. Well, not quite verging but certainly finding it increasingly difficult to think about anything other than the food in my bag. Finding somewhere to eat it was a problem – Skansen has an assortment of cafes and restaurants but I didn’t imagine many of them would welcome you bringing your own sandwiches. There are picnic areas – outside in the cold. In the end, I discovered that one of the cafes by the petting zoo is upstairs and if you’re discrete, you can sit on the chairs in the hallway downstairs and eat sandwiches under cover of reading your guidebook. Sorry, Skansen. If I ate outside, you’d be sweeping up frostbitten fingers.
I made my way back to the exit by the long way round, not aiming at anywhere in particular. I didn’t stop – I didn’t have enough real interest in the history to spend long poring over the buildings but it’s nice to imagine you’re walking through an old village in the woods as you weave your way downhill.
And then I stepped out into another world. There was an ice rink and a well-lit stage and a restaurant inside a building that brought to mind the world “orangery”. This didn’t match the rural idyll the rest of the place felt like. It didn’t feel intrusive or ultra-modern but this was definitely from a different century to the rest of Skansen.
In winter, Skansen closes at 3pm, otherwise I’d have lingered longer. As it is, I might well go back next time I’m in Stockholm – and I definitely recommend you take at least half a day there if you’re ever in Stockholm.