14 - 18 June: Visby, Gotland

Unfortunately, our first two days on the island of Gotland were a complete wash-out, as we’d both picked up some horrible stomach bug and summer cold and hardly moved from our cabin!

Luckily, we had about 4 days here, so still had enough time to explore the town and the island. We went on an excellent walking tour with Aiden from Free Tours Visby which started from outside the Tourist Information Office.  He was entertaining and informative and had many interesting anecdotes – highly recommended if you are ever in Visby!

Gotland is about 80 miles from the Swedish coast and 110 miles from Latvia on the east coast of the Baltic. Early on, Gotland became a commercial centre because of its strategic position between Sweden and Russia, and the town of Visby was the most important Hanseatic city in the Baltic Sea.

Visby is a beautiful old medieval town with an almost intact ‘ring wall’ on three sides, and the sea on the fourth side.  This is part of the ring wall and its fortifications …

There are quite a few really tall warehouse buildings with ‘stepped’ roofs – apparently in medieval times the skyline with such high buildings would have seemed as impressive as the Manhattan skyline today …

This is the oldest medieval warehouse …

Many of the narrow, winding cobblestone streets are still laid out in the original medieval pattern – this is one of the most photographed views of Visby, but you’ll have to try and imagine it without the scaffolding on the cathedral tower!

The oldest buildings have extremely low windows and doors …

Some dwellings are built directly attached to the ‘ring wall’.  This was the hangman’s house – he was forced to live on the very outskirts of the town near one of the gates …

This is St Mary’s Cathedral. The middle ‘window’ half-way up the façade is actually a door, which leads to a massive warehouse area in the roof. There used to be a bridge leading to the door from the adjacent hillside …

Inside the cathedral the ceiling is much lower than the height of the roof ...

Here is our guide, Aiden, with a sculpture of the famous 18^th century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who undertook expeditions to Gotland and identified much of the flora and fauna here …

… and this is a view of the botanic gardens in Visby …

Here is a view over the rooftops of the town, including the ruins of St Catherine’s Church …

… and unexpectedly round the corner the familiar sight of a pub!

One day, we hired an ‘old banger’ from the harbour office to explore a bit further afield– very comfortable despite having 300,000 km on the clock.  This gave us a chance to see some of the interior of the island and the southern coast.

The roads were virtually empty and very pretty with blue and yellow wildflowers lining the verges and sometimes fields of poppies …

Here is an old-fashioned windmill …

… and a medieval church …

… with painted decoration on the walls, pews and behind the altar …

These are some old fishermen’s shacks on the coast …

… and these are some of the fantastic limestone ‘rauks’ – weathered karst formations – which can be found around Gotland’s coastline …

This one looks like a large sea creature or perhaps a submarine!

This is a pretty bay with some of the blue wildflowers which grow everywhere on Gotland at this time of year …

… and this is the view at Hoburgen on the southern tip of Gotland. The big rock is called Hoburgsgubben, a famous sea stack which looks a bit like a man's head – you can see the yellow ‘nose’!

We had afternoon tea at an old farm …

… then went to Djupvik where fishermen still dry their nets on these wooden poles outside their traditional huts …

Then watched the sun go down over the twin islands, Stora and Lilla Karlsö …