Göteborg

I spent a week in Sweden, more precisely in Gothenburg (Göteborg in Swedish), to visit my old mother and some friends. The weather was rather typical for the end of the autumn; grey, some light rain / fog, temperature a bit over freezing… Gothenburg is on the west coast, rather south in Sweden, and does not so easily get any snow.

The city is not yet four centuries old. Its place on the map at the mouth of the Göta River, squeezed in between what was Norway and Denmark until 1658, and difficult ground conditions led to several unfruitful attempts to build a town here.

The city plan owes a lot to the Dutch. The town used to be full of canals and many of them are still left. Its major importance has been to be a port, the leading Nordic one, and the port used to be part of the city life. Most of the Nordic immigrants to the States left from here.

The port activities are now closer to the open sea and what you still can see close to the centre is now rather like a museum. Gothenburg was also a leading shipbuilding centre until the 60’s.

Today, it’s still the home of e.g. SKF (the world’s largest bearing manufacturer) and of Volvo (which originally was a subsidiary to SKF), but the city is less and less industrial and is now e.g. the biggest Nordic university town. Totally some 500 thousand people live in the city, some 900 thousand with suburbs.

The apartment buildings I show below, close to the city centre, are mostly from the 19th or the very beginning of the 20th century (and my mother still lives in one of them).You can find some of these photos on my photo blog.