Nämdö skärgård

Nämdö skärgård is the newest park in Sweden — decided by the government in June 2025 and inaugurated that September on Bullerö — and the first marine national park in the Baltic proper. The numbers describe its character: 25,300 hectares, of which 97 per cent is water, wrapped around roughly a thousand islands, islets and bare skerries in the outer Stockholm archipelago east of Nämdö. Kosterhavet protects Sweden's Atlantic sea; this park protects the Baltic one — bladderwrack belts, eelgrass meadows and shallow lagoon bays that work as nurseries for pike, perch and whitefish, the underwater infrastructure of the whole archipelago.

Above the surface it is the classic outer skerry world: wind-pruned pines, bare pink granite, eider and razorbill water, and the particular silence of the archipelago's seaward edge. Much of it entered the park ready-made, assembled from long-standing reserves — above all Bullerö and Långviksskär, names with a century of archipelago lore behind them. Bullerö was bought in 1908 by the painter Bruno Liljefors, whose hunting villa became the gathering place for the artists and writers who invented the Swedish cult of the outer archipelago; the island now serves as the park's main entrance, and the villa as its memory.

The park's designation was also a statement of intent for the Baltic: a sea in well-documented trouble getting its first national park is conservation aimed below the waterline, where the trouble is.

What's worth knowing before you go

There is no bridge and no car anywhere in this story: Waxholmsbolaget boats run from Stavsnäs (an hour from Stockholm) to Nämdö, the big inhabited island at the park's edge, and from there it is your own boat, a kayak, or a seasonal tour out to Bullerö, where the entrance facilities and information are. This is one of Sweden's great sea-kayaking landscapes — sheltered lagoons inside, real exposure outside — and the outermost bird skerries carry seasonal landing bans, marked on the park map. Winter storms and November crossings are for locals; June to September is the season.

The connoisseur's detail is Liljefors's cabin on Bullerö — stand in it, look out at the skerries he painted, and you are looking at the reason Swedes decided this horizon was worth a national park.