Skansen Kronan and Botaniska Trädgården

After lunch in Gamla Haga, I walked not too far to a fort, Skansen Kronan. After that, I took a long walk to Gothenburg’s botanical gardens, Botaniska Trädgården. That was my afternoon, a fuller, but, at the same time, less full afternoon than I expected. Sounds contradictory? Don’t panic. I’ll get to that.

Let’s get the translations out of the way, shall we? Google Translate tells me that “Skansen Kronan” translates to “The Kronan Skansen” in English. Okay. Maybe that one is just a name.

It tells me that “Botaniska Trädgården” translates to “Botanical Garden” in English. Well, that makes sense, seeing as though, as I said, it’s a botanical garden.

Translations out of the way, let’s get going. My website has been misbehaving all day, and I’m hoping to get this posted between intermittent crashes. It might take a few attempts, and I’m not getting any younger. My dedication to my few readers astounds me sometimes.

Then again, if my website continued to be intermittently down, you had to grab this page during one of its up times, which may have taken you a couple of attempts. My (very) few regular readers’ dedication to this journal astounds me even more. Thank you so much!

Skansen Kronan

Skansen Kronan is a small, octagonal, stone fortress built, according to one of my guidebooks, in 1687. The guidebook refers to that as “Sweden’s Age of Greatness.”

I’d never seen or heard that term, Sweden’s Age of Greatness, before. What is Sweden now? Chopped liver?

Now that I’ve said that…

(Oh, no! Joel’s about to go off on one of his ridiculous tangents. I must know it.)

I’ve never understood the shtick, “What am I, chopped liver?”

(See. What did I tell you?)

Seriously. I love chopped liver. It’s one of humankind’s great culinary inventions. Saying, “What am I, chopped liver?” is like saying, “What am I, something truly great and to be highly celebrated?” But I don’t think that’s what people mean by it.

There. Tangent over. That wasn’t so bad, was it?

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Skansen Kronan.

There’s not much to say. Skansen Kronan is a small but impressive fortress. One of the sides of the octagonal building was hidden by scaffolding today, but most of the other seven sides were unobstructed. The DLJSSIA didn’t make much of an effort here, did it?

(If you’re new to this journal and don’t yet know what DLJSSIA stands for, unfortunately, at the time of writing, Google hadn’t yet indexed it. So you might still not be able to find a definition that way. But you can use the search function on this journal to find it. Where the search box appears depends on the size of the screen you’re viewing it on. Hunt for it. Of course, it would have been easier to just tell you what it stands for than write this long paragraph. But I have indeed now written this long paragraph, haven’t I? I’ll be damned if I’m going to waste more of my time by spelling DLJSSAI out for you too now that I’ve done that.)

Skansen Kronan isn’t open for the general public to enter, just to view close-up from the outside. At least, it didn’t appear to be open today. All of the visible doors were firmly shut. And there were no signs inviting people in. There may be a grand entrance and a welcoming sign inviting everyone in behind the scaffolding, just waiting to be exposed when I leave. But how would I know?

Oh. I forgot to mention. There is something more to say about Skansen Kronan. There’s a giant golden crown on top. And when I say, “crown,” I mean crown. I don’t mean it like, “he crowned his head with a cheap, weathered baseball cap.” I mean it like a royal crown.

I doubt it’s real gold. Why would you bother putting that way up there? Who’d know if it’s just gold paint? I know I wouldn’t.

Wait. Wait just a gosh darn minute. Kronan? Crown? Sure enough. If I ask Google Translate to translate just “kronan,” rather than “Stansen Kronan,” it tells me that the Swedish word kronan means crown in English. Well, smarty pants Google Translate, why couldn’t you translate “Stransen Kronan” into “the Stansen Crown” rather than “The Kronan Skansen?” Hmm? Why not? What’s the matter with you?

It’s probably AI. Never trust AI.

But enough about that.

Because Stansen Kronan is perched at the very top of a hill, there are some good views of Gothenburg and the surrounding area to be had from up there. And I had them.

The Walk from Skansen Kronan to Botaniska Trädgården

For a large part of the route that Apple Maps gave me from Skansen Kronan to Botaniska Trädgården, it took me along one side of a huge park in Gothenburg, Slottsskogen. (I guess they had a sale on Ts and Ss, so they used two of each, in addition to the leading S.)

As well as a huge expanse of parkland, with trees, grass, a small lake with a fountain, and a few ponds, Slottsskogen has at least a couple of attractions within it. The ones I know about are a small zoo and a major natural history museum. I figured I’d visit one of the two on the way back. After all, it didn’t take long to visit Skansen Kronan, and, while I like botanical gardens, how long can you spend in one?

I thought I’d probably do the zoo because, according to what I read, it primarily has just Nordic animals, along with some seals and penguins. I thought it’d be quicker and, because it’s a beautiful day today, staying with outdoor activities seemed like the smarter option.

It didn’t quite work out that way. I didn’t visit either, for reasons I’ll get into below. That’s the less-full-afternoon-than-I-thought part I mentioned in the introduction.

After I got out of Slottsskogen, the route took me across a bridge over some tram tracks and a minor highway. On the other side, I had to double back a piece to get to Botaniska Trädgården.

I saw the sign for Botaniska Trädgården while I was still well in Slottsskogen. If I hadn’t followed Apple Maps’ route and crossed at an earlier bridge, it would have saved me several steps.

Botaniska Trädgården

Botaniska Trädgården is a very large botanical garden. One of my guidebooks tells me that it covers 432 acres and contains 16,000 species.

That guidebook also told me that it has some large greenhouses. Greenhouses, plural. Great! It’ll make up for the large Palm House greenhouse that was closed for renovations when I tried to visit it this morning in Trädgårdsföreningen.

When I got to Botaniska Trädgården, I saw a very small greenhouse up on a hill beyond the entrance. It turned out to hold a few alpine plants. But I didn’t see any large greenhouses.

While in the gardens, I opened its website. Guess what. The Botaniska Trädgården is undertaking the largest project in its history. It’s replacing its large greenhouses with new ones and a visitor centre in the same location as the old ones. So the greenhouses are closed. Construction of the new greenhouses is scheduled to be completed in 2028. They’re expected to be open to the public in 2030. It’s currently June 2025. I don’t think I can wait around that long.

Nevertheless, most of the botanical garden is outdoors and very much open.

Just past the entrance, there’s a rectangular ornamental pool with a fountain statue in it. The statue is of a mermaid. Her arms are crooked with her forearms pointing straight up. She is holding a fish in each hand. Continuous streams of water shoot out of the mouths of each of the fish. I thought a reader might enjoy that imagery.

As I said, the Botaniska Trädgården is huge. It has several sections. A few I remember are a valley filled with rhododendrons; Asian, European, and American arboretums; Japanese and Korean glades; some clumps of different varieties of bamboo; and a rock garden in a former quarry.

The rock garden was stunning, but I don’t know why anyone would bother. They are so heavy that they must be difficult to plant. And when you do plant them, the rocks never grow. Fortunately, someone had the good sense to plant a wide variety of a lot beautiful flowers in the soil between, around, and in any indentations on the top of the rocks. Otherwise, they’d just be rocks.

Amid the rock garden, there was also a small waterfall and a small pond with some water lilies, with buds just starting to show yellow flowers. A bunch of fish swam around the pond. I’ll try to remember to post a picture of that because, again, I think the same reader will appreciate that.

At a few points in the garden, I saw signs indicating that you can’t walk in that section with bare feet. There were no words on the sign, just an illustration of a bare foot with the toes fully exposed and a slash through the foot. I can understand that. After a long, hot day of walking around, the smell of my bare feet would probably kill the plants.

It’s possible I misunderstood the meaning of the sign.

I also found a path that led me up a hill over some stone steps to a great vantage point.

I walked back down the hill and through some more of the gardens. I’m sure I missed a few sections because there are a lot of paths. There doesn’t appear to be a logical route through it to see everything.

At the back of Botaniska Trädgården I came to a gate that led into a nature reserve. I took a few steps in, and peered down a couple of trails at a fork in the trail. They both went through a forest.

By then, I was getting very tired. My legs were getting even more tired. That’s the fuller-afternoon-than-I-thought part I mentioned in the introduction.

I’m getting old. I long for lost youth. Not my youth, you understand. I was a klutzy, shy, neurotic, weak, inhibited youth. But someone else’s youth would be grand.

After going back through the gate back into Botaniska Trädgården, I decided it was time to take my tired legs, along with the rest of my body, back to my hotel. I pulled out Google Maps this time. It told me that, from that back end of the gardens, it would take more than an hour and a quarter to walk back to my hotel.

The route it gave me did not take me anywhere close to the same way I came on the way over.

I followed the route it gave me. It kept to the back end of the gardens until it took me to another gate. The gate was another entrance to the nature reserve. So the first part of my long trek back was through that reserve, which was a very beautiful forest.

The route carried me up a hill that was, not horrendous, but longer and steeper than I wanted to climb after a long day, particularly because I’m now a man my age. But I didn’t have any choice what with being out of civilization. So, up I climbed.

The exit out of the reserve dumped me into a very nice residential area of single-family, detached homes with large backyards. The homes varied in size from quite small to quite large. Each had a unique design.

That neighbourhood was near the top of the hill I climbed in the reserve. The walk back down into central Gothenburg was, therefore, mostly downhill. So at least my exhuasted legs didn’t have a climb to complain about on the way. They found lots else to complain about, though. They love to complain these days.

By the time I got back to the hotel, I was very much ready to relax and end my day’s activities. I sat in my room, fought with my recalcitrant website to publish my morning post, and then had dinner at the hotel restaurant, where I plugged the first of these words into my phone.

Whatever will I get up to tomorrow