Southern Öland cultural landscape
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. Counts of visitors and wishes will appear once enough people use the app.
Seals, want-to-go and the year you stood here are recorded in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
Öland is a Swedish island in the Baltic, and most of its southern part is the limestone plain of Stora Alvaret. With thin soil and a warm, dry climate, islanders have had to fit their way of life to what the land allowed, and the south carries traces of some 5,000 years of settlement.
Nineteen Iron Age ring forts are known on the island; Eketorp, the only one fully excavated, yielded more than 24,000 finds. In the Middle Ages land was divided into infields of arable and meadow near each village and outlying pasture on the alvar and the coast. The villages lie in rows along an old road, a pattern still easy to see.
In the 19th century pastures on the Swedish mainland and across much of Europe were turned over to timber, but Öland's poor soil ruled that out, so the old division survived. Stone walls from land reforms of the 18th and 19th centuries still mark the fields. The landscape was inscribed in 2000, and farmers still work fields ploughed for generations.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).