Gotska Sandön
An isolated sand-dune island north of Gotland — pine forest, seal colonies, and no permanent road.
Gotska Sandön is the loneliest place in the Baltic with a name: a nine-kilometre island of pure sand nearly forty kilometres north of Gotland's Fårö, with no harbour, no permanent road, and open sea in every direction. The whole island is a wandering dune field pinned down by pine forest — high dune ridges inland, bare migrating sand at the exposed points, and an unbroken ring of empty beach, tens of kilometres of it, that you will mostly have to yourself even in July. It has been protected since 1909, part of the founding generation of parks.
The forest is stranger than it first looks. Centuries of sun-baked, storm-killed pines left standing have made the island one of northern Europe's great refuges for rare wood-living beetles — species dependent on exactly the warm dead timber that tidy forestry removed from the mainland. Around the shore, the sandbanks haul out one of the Baltic's largest grey seal colonies; watching the seals off the northern points is the island's standing spectacle.
People have always been marginal here, and the margins were colourful: seal hunters, wreckers and salvagers, and from 1859 the lighthouse establishment whose keepers' hamlet is still the island's only settlement. Their small church, graveyards of drowned sailors, and the lighthouse itself give the interior its faint, well-kept ghost-town air.
What's worth knowing before you go
Boats run in summer from Nynäshamn and from Fårösund on Gotland, and land on the open beach — which means everything is weather-dependent, and being stranded an extra day is a real possibility to plan for, not an anecdote. Accommodation is camping and simple cabins near the lighthouse, booked well ahead; there is a small shop's worth of supplies at most, so bring what you need. Distances deceive: walking in soft sand is slow, and the round-island beach walk is a genuine full day.
The connoisseur's detail is the dead pines — silvered, twisted, standing for a century after dying. Photographers get up for them at dawn the way other people get up for summits.