The southwest - The Rough Guide to Sweden - page 168

Ì Stortorget Stortorget 1. Housed in a National
Romantic building that was formerly a bank, this trendy
brasserie specializes in modern Swedish dishes, for
example, pork with salsify with black-eyed peas for 164kr.
Mains 154-214kr. Mon-Thurs 11.30am-11pm, Fri & Sat
11.30am-1am.

Tegnérs Matsalar Sandgatan 2 T 046 13 13 33. Next to
Akademiska Föreningen, the student union. Forget any
preconceptions about student cafés being tatty, stale
sandwich bars. Lunch (75kr) is self-service and you eat as
much as you like from a delicious spread. Mon-Fri
11.30am-1.30pm.

5

Malmö
Founded in the late thirteenth century, MALMÖ was once Denmark's second most
important city, after Copenhagen. The high density of herring in the sea of the Malmö
coast - it was said that the fish could be scooped straight out with a trowel - brought
ambitious German merchants flocking; their influence can be seen in the striking
fourteenth-century St Petri kyrka in the city centre.
Today, with its attractive medieval centre, a myriad of cobbled and mainly
pedestrianized streets, full of busy restaurants and bars, Malmö has plenty of style.
Beyond its compact centre, it's endowed with the stunning and dramatic skyscraper ,
the Turning Torso (see p.176), a string of popular beaches and some interesting cultural
diversions south of the centre around Möllevångstorget square .

Brief history
Eric of Pomerania gave Malmö its most significant medieval boost, when, in the
fifteenth century, he built the castle, endowed it with its own mint and gave Malmö its
own flag - the gold-and-red griffin of his own family crest. It wasn't until the Swedish
king Karl X marched his armies across the frozen Öresund to within striking distance
of Copenhagen in 1658 that the Danes were forced into handing back the counties of
Skåne, Blekinge and Bohuslän to the Swedes. For Malmö, too far from its own
(uninterested) capital, this meant a period of stagnation, cut of from nearby
Copenhagen. Not until the full thrust of industrialization, triggered by the tobacco
merchant Frans Suell's enlargement of the harbour in 1775 (his jaunty bronze likeness,
on Norra Vallgatan opposite the train station, overlooks his handiwork), did Malmö
begin its dramatic commercial recovery. In 1840, boats began regular trips to
Copenhagen, and Malmö's great Kockums shipyard was opened; limestone quarrying,
too, became big business here in the nineteenth century.
During the last few decades of the twentieth century, Malmö found itself facing
commercial crisis after a series of economic miscalculations, which included investing
heavily in the shipping industry as it went into decline in the 1970s. But recent years
have witnessed a dramatic renaissance, reflected in the upbeat, thoroughly likeable
atmosphere pervading the town today. Since the opening of the Öresund bridge linking
the town to Copenhagen, the city's fortunes have been further improved, with Danes
discovering what this gateway to Sweden has to offer, as opposed to the one-way traffic
of Swedes to Denmark in the past.

Stortorget
The laying out of Stortorget , the proud main square, necessitated the tearing down of
much of Malmö's medieval centre in the mid-sixteenth century. Among the elaborate
sixteenth- to nineteenth-century buildings, the 1546 Rådhus draws the most attention.
It's an impressive pageant of architectural fiddling and crowded with statuary:
restoration programmes in the last century robbed the building of its original design,
and the finicky exterior is now in Dutch Renaissance style. To add to the pomp, the
red-and-gold flag of Skåne, of which Malmö is so proud, flaps above the roofs. The
cellars, home to the Rådhuskällaren restaurant (see p.179), have been used as a tavern