Vasa Museum
A 1628 warship preserved ninety-eight per cent intact, sunk after thirteen hundred metres.
Duration
1 hr 30 min – 2 hrs 30 min
Best time
At opening
Open
Every day
Entry price
To confirm
The Vasa was to be the most powerful warship in the Baltic. It sailed on 10 August 1628 before the crowds of Stockholm, caught a gust, heeled over and sank after thirteen hundred metres. It was too tall and too narrow, with two gun decks imposed by the king against his builders' advice.
The brackish Baltic has none of the shipworm that eats timber elsewhere: the ship lay intact in the mud for three hundred and thirty-three years. Raised in 1961, it is ninety-eight per cent original — the only seventeenth-century ship in the world in that state, and it fills a museum built around it.
Getting there
On Djurgården island. Tram 7 from the centre, or the public boat from Slussen — the crossing is part of the network.
What the price covers
paid entry, rate to be checked; included in the Stockholm Pass
Rules on site
The hall is kept at eighteen degrees and fifty-three per cent humidity for the timber: you get cold in there in summer in beach clothes. The museum is packed from eleven to three.
