Scan Magazine | Special Theme | Top Destinations to Visit in Sweden in 2019
Visit Trelleborg — Sweden’s starting point When you first arrive in Trelleborg during summer time and travel along the coast, you will reach a road lined with palm trees – an unusual sight in Sweden. “Trelleborg is often called ‘the city of palm trees’. We have 100 palm trees around the city, mostly along the avenue leading into central Trelleborg, that are planted every summer. When you see them, you know you’ve come to Trelleborg,” says Petra Strandberg, marketing director at Visit Trelleborg.
turn the Danes to Christianity,” explains Strandberg. And indeed, you recognise the king’s name because of the wireless sharing and communication technology we all have in our phones – it was named after him.
By Hanna Andersson | Photos: Jenny Brandt
A quarter of the fortress has been reconstructed and is now an open-air Viking museum, where the event Battle of Trelleborgen is hosted during the second weekend of July every year. Meet the Vikings, visit the market, attend a Viking wedding, and climb the fortress to look out over the society that king Harold once ruled over.
After you pass the palm trees, you are greeted by the town centre that follows the coast, on the same ground where Vikings once walked. In the late 1980s, a sensational discovery was made in Trelleborg: the remains of a Viking Age fort. It turned out to be a so-called ‘trelleborg’, a circular fort, with the word ‘trelle’ referring to the slanted timber staves that support the palisade. The discovery 64 | Issue 120 | January 2019
solved the mystery of how the city got its name. The Viking king Harold Bluetooth built many circular forts in Denmark and southern Sweden in the late tenth century and, so far, eight of them have been unearthed. “We believe he built them to defend his kingdom, maybe to form a communication system, collect taxes and
Peacocks, golf and farm shops Trelleborg has always been a town con-