Stockholm's history runs from 11th-century rune stones to the 1520 Bloodbath that triggered Swedish independence. This route follows the Vasa dynasty through Gamla Stan's cellars, then out to the Iron Age burial mounds of Birka and Gamla Uppsala.
The Tre Kronor Museum sits in the surviving medieval cellar of the castle that burned in 1697 — original 13th-century defensive wall visible. Palace open 10:00-17:00 summer, closed Mondays off-season. Ticket covers four museums.
Stockholm's 1279 cathedral holds Bernt Notke's 1489 St George and the Dragon, carved to mark the Swedish victory at Brunkeberg. Outside on Stortorget, 82 nobles were beheaded in November 1520 on Christian II's orders.
Built underground around a 55-metre stretch of Gustav Vasa's 1530s city wall, discovered during a 1978 car park excavation. Holds the Riddarholm ship, a 20-metre wreck from the 1520s, plus a reconstructed medieval gallows site.
A late-1200s Greyfriars abbey church and the burial place of Swedish monarchs since Magnus Ladulås died in 1290 — Gustav II Adolf, killed at Lützen in 1632, lies in the green marble sarcophagus in the Gustavian chapel.
Three floors in an 18th-century artillery yard tracing Sweden from the Thirty Years' War through 200 years of armed neutrality. Includes Gustav II Adolf's blood-stained buff coat from Lützen and the Karl XII death mask.
A flat memorial plaque marks the pavement outside Dekorima where Sweden's prime minister was shot on 28 February 1986, walking home from the cinema without bodyguards. The case was formally closed unsolved in June 2020.
Gustav III was shot at a masked ball in the old opera house in March 1792 and died 13 days later. His Haga pavilion, finished 1792, preserves the Pompeian interiors of the king who staged Sweden's 1772 royal coup.
The 1905 parliament building sits on Helgeandsholmen; the 1971 Sergels Torg plaza below became the staging ground for Vietnam War demonstrations and the 1986 Palme memorial gathering that filled the square with flowers.
Holds the Gold Room, a 700-square-metre underground vault with 52 kg of prehistoric gold and silver, including the 5th-century Timboholm hoard. The Viking exhibition covers trade routes east to Byzantium and the Caspian.
Södermalm's 18th-century wooden quarter around Fjällgatan and Stigbergsgatan survived the fires that levelled the rest. Below sit the working-class dwellings that inspired Per Anders Fogelström's Stockholm novels.
In Tessin the Younger's 1680s palace at Slussen, telling the city's story from a 1252 trade town to a 20th-century capital, including the 1960s Norrmalm demolitions that flattened 700 buildings in the old centre.
The navy's base from 1640 until 1969, still lined with barracks, the 1848 Skeppsholmskyrkan rotunda and the 1888 full-rigger af Chapman moored at the quay. The island stayed closed to civilians for over three centuries.