Gammelstad Church Town
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How it came to be
Gammelstad, at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia in northern Sweden, began as a trading place, and a stone church was built there in the 15th century. Farmers from the surrounding countryside, too far away to go home the same day, built small wooden houses by the church to stay in on Sundays and religious festivals.
By the 17th century land uplift had made the harbour unusable, and the commercial centre moved to a new town, Luleå. The old church site became Gammelstad, the Old Town, which spared it from later industrialisation.
Around the church stand 520 buildings, including 404 church cottages. It was inscribed in 1996 as the best-preserved example of the church villages once common in northern Scandinavia.
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