West Sweden & Bohuslän – an adventure in sustainability

Author: Sarah Baxter

It’s a mix that’s been drawing travellers to the Bohuslän coast for 150 years, when the first spa resorts opened, serving wellness to the well-to-do. Now – thank goodness – you don’t need to be an aristocrat to enjoy this natural medicine, and it’s just as potent.

I thought about this as, on a fine September day, I lazed in the outdoor pool at Kusthotellet in Styrsö. Opened in August 2025, this new hotel continues the island’s old traditions: Styrsö, in the southern Gothenburg archipelago, was one of Sweden’s first spa resorts, and the Kusthotellet sits by the site of the former Coast Hospital, which was built so patients could be immersed in the island’s health-boosting conditions year-round. The hotel – a smart, modern retreat, serving excellent food – is doing likewise: it plans to stay open 12 months a year. Not only so tourists can benefit but so the island can benefit too.

 

This was my second visit to West Sweden. On the first, I explored the lakes, forests and flat-topped mountains of the lesser-trodden hinterland by electric car; this time I was island-hopping north along the coast, from Gothenburg to the Norwegian border. Both trips gave me the opportunity to see the region’s Stepping up Sustainability programme in action, in different ways.

Stepping up Sustainability has four key principles, which range from ensuring tourism has as low an environmental impact as possible to encouraging visitors outside of peak times. At Kusthotellet I saw a business doing just that and, in aiming to support more full-time jobs, being good for both visitors and residents.

“We want this to be a living archipelago,” they explained. 

It seemed incredible to me that the traditional tourist season here is just a few weeks in July and early August. As far as I could see, autumn was perfect: berries budding, leaves turning, the sun still shining, the sea still enticing.

Local seaweed diver and nature guide Karolina Martinson agreed. “It’s like the season here has a stop/start button – we need to change that,” she told me as we cycled down the car-free island’s narrow lanes. “Besides, seaweed, lobster, crayfish – they’re all better in autumn.” As if to prove it, she took me to a secluded spot and created a mouthwatering beach feast of Asian-inspired kelp salad, seaweed-infused sausage and rose-hip soup. Delicious. 

This is one of the best things about sustainability, West Sweden style: it comes without sacrifice. Yes, travelling in less popular months and eating seaweed – an environmental superfood – is laudable from an eco-friendly point of view. But it’s also flavour-packed fun.

It was the same at Ljungskile, further up the coast, where I met Janne Bark. Eating mussels farmed just offshore is good for the environment: they’re an extremely low-carbon protein source and act as natural water filters. But, served fresh-cooked in wine and spices by Janne at Musselbaren, his micro-distillery and restaurant in Lyckorna, they taste out of this world. And a morning spent with him, aboard his boat the M/S Marta, was both foodie education and a lovely cruise. We bobbed in the calm, atmospherically misty inner fjord and we pulled up mussel ropes, discovering an array of fascinating critters, from ghost shrimp to sea squirts. 

My next stop, Smögen, has developed a different way to try to make tourism more sustainable. With its eminently Instagrammable harbour of cute fishing huts and boardwalk-spilling cafes, Smögen heaves in summer. But how to better spread those visitors? The Island of Light festival makes the most of September’s darkening skies, inviting artists from around the world to create light installations in nature. Smögen’s smooth pink-granite outcrops, coves and clefts become canvases for luminous creations; these include collaborations with the Sotenäs Marine Recycling Center, repurposing some of the 40-or-so tonnes of discarded fishing gear it collects each year into thought-provoking and joyous works of art.

Smögen was abuzz as the sun began to set and the magic started to happen. Walking the art trail in the dark, I felt like a child again, watching in wonder as Yggdrasil – a ‘tree’ made from nets, ropes and plastics – reflected in the water, and as jellyfish pulsed beneath hypnotically shifting Shapes, crafted from reused nets. Then a near-silent swoosh of kayakers, decked in fairylights, paddled before Lithogensis, a work that reimagined the birth of Smögen in an epic-scale dance of sound and light.

From Smögen I headed for Strömstad. Another 19th-century spa town, it’s also the gateway to the glorious Koster Islands, Sweden’s first marine national park, and the sort of place where you feel the hurly-burly of the modern word fall away. I took the ferry over and didn’t really want to leave, quickly reimagining my life full of only these simple things: carefree cycling past sheep-grazed fields, paddles to deserted beaches, swims in brilliant-blue seas. But Strömstad was worth the return. 

Here, I checked in at Lagunen, a cluster of cabins, wooden tents, bell tents and pitches, open year round, that tumbles over forested slopes by the water’s edge. It’s been run by the same family for decades, and they know how to provide a warm welcome. They lent me a bicycle, and I pedalled into the forest where an excellent bike park awaits off-road riders and where site owner Pelle Olausson awaited me, brewing a pot of camp coffee over a roaring fire – “it’s a simple thing,” he said, “but people love cooking outside”. Pelle explained how things were changing here, how Bohuslän businesses have started working together, not least organising tours and events to extend the tourist season. “We try to help each other,” Pelle said. “Everyone wants to put this area on the map, and make it as good as it can be.”

That night, I slept in Matros Martinsson, Lagunen’s boathouse, named for the sailor and smuggler who first opened the campsite in the 1950s. It floats on its own so that, despite the proximity of the other campers, I felt totally alone. When dawn broke the next morning, I flung wide the doors and lay, half-awake, listening to the geese, the water and the wind in the trees, taking a last dose of my West Sweden medicine.

"The Bohuslän coast was, in some ways, exactly what I hoped it would be: dreamy shores of white-sand and smooth granite licked by clear-blue seas; wooden cabins painted joyful colours; days of delightful adventure, from kayak paddles to cycles on car-free isles. But it was also so much more, because along the way I discovered how local people are caring for their special part of the world, and how they're sharing it with visitors – be that leading swims to forage for seaweed or taking trips out to sustainably farmed mussel beds. Brilliantly, these things are both good for nature and make for unforgettable travel experiences."

Sarah Baxter

Watch Green Traveller's film about Bohuslän