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QUALITY OF LIFE

What makes a northern Swedish town of 1,000 a great place to live?

The small town of Sorsele in Swedish Lapland has been rated as the best small town in Sweden for local amenities by a new study.

What makes a northern Swedish town of 1,000 a great place to live?
Would you want to live here, in Sorsele? Photo: Anna Simonsson/SvD/TT

Property and housing magazine Hem & Hyra looked at the total number of service points, including grocery stores, pharmacies, schools, ATMs, and petrol stations, and measured which towns had the highest number of facilities per capita.

Sorsele, a town otherwise known for its hiking and skiing opportunities, came top of all 2,011 “urban areas” in the country. It’s the main town in the municipality of the same name, home to part of the huge Vindelfjällens Nature Reserve.

It boasts a high school, three grocery stores, doctor’s office, and a branch of the alcohol monopoly Systembolaget. All in all, it counts 17.1 amenities per 1,000 residents, more than anywhere else in Sweden.

Also available in Sorsele (but not included as service points for the purpose of the study) are a hardware store, bakery, florist, and grill restaurant, but no dentist and no bank after its last bank branch closed in May of this year.

“We are pretty good but some parts are missing. We have no clothes shop. But we have just enough,” Kjell Öjeryd, the chairman of the municipal board, told the magazine.

A total of 1,113 people lived in Sorsele at the end of 2020, according to Statistics Sweden.

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DISCOVER SWEDEN

The sun will now not set in northern Sweden until mid-July

It's the season of the midnight sun (midnattssol) when the sun remains fully above the horizon around the clock.

The sun will now not set in northern Sweden until mid-July

At 38 minutes after midnight on Monday, the sun rose in Karesuando, Sweden’s most northerly settlement, and will not now set until mid-July.

The midnight sun first arrived at the Swedish border on Saturday, and will now move slowly south towards the Arctic Circle until the summer solstice on June 21st, with the ski resort of Riksgränsen getting it on May 25th, and Kiruna, Sweden’s most northerly city on May 28th. 

Even if you do not live in an area that gets the midnight sun in Sweden, the days are still growing longer. Down in Stockholm, the sun is currently up for almost three-quarters of the day (more than 17 hours), and the same is true in Gothenburg, with Malmö getting more than 16 hours of sunlight each day.

The summer solstice, when the day is at its longest and the night at its shortest, is on June 21st.

Do you live in northern Sweden? Please send your photos of the midnight sun to [email protected], with ‘Midnight sun’ as the subject line.

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