Pedalling through backwater Styrsö on a sit-up-and-beg bicycle, I follow lanes dotted with wooden weatherboard houses and apple and cherry blossom. Locals glide past in golfcarts as I near the polished rock shoreline, where the hammering sound of woodpeckers is replaced by that of garrulous gulls around quaint little fishing harbours like Tången. Once prosperous through salting herring, its halcyon days are marked by the handsome homes of sea captains and rows of red fishing sheds.
Like all of Gothenburg’s southern archipelago in the Kattegat Sea, Styrsö is car-free. Bylaws permit the use of only bicycles, electric golfcarts and mopeds – plus, in the case of Köpstadsö island, wheelbarrows – which lends the islands a timeless unhurried ambience.
Getting here from Gothenburg is easy and inexpensive, making a few days island-hopping a natural extension to a city break. Having checked out of the city’s elegant 19th-century Hotel Royal, I took tram no 11 to Saltholmen to catch the 70-minute ferry to Styrsö, a journey costing just SEK37 (£2.95).
An island of 1,500 residents, Styrsö is scattered with forest and lined with ice-smoothed bedrock. In the 19th century, it was a popular location for health and wellness sanatoriums, with people travelling here from the mainland in search of cures for various ailments.
