Stockholm: Viking History Uppsala & Sigtuna Full-Day Tour

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Free cancellationTravelers' pick

1/19

Duration9h

GroupUp to 17

LanguagesEN · SV

PickupAt your hotel

A Thousand Years in One Day: From Viking Parliament to Medieval Cathedral

You visit five major Viking and medieval sites north of Stockholm—a Viking causeway, an ancient parliament site, a preserved longhouse, Sweden's oldest town, and royal burial mounds—with a professional guide explaining the history at each stop. Hotel pickup and drop-off in central Stockholm are included, as is transport by minibus. The day runs full-length, so plan for around eight hours from pickup to return.

Step-by-step itinerary

The Experience

Most people visit Stockholm and never leave the city center. On this full-day trip, you drive north through Swedish countryside to places where Vikings actually governed, lived, and buried their kings—and it changes how you read the landscape. The tour starts with hotel pickup in central Stockholm and moves through a series of stops that build a picture of Sweden's Viking and medieval past, each one a physical place where something happened, not just a museum display about it.

The first real stop is Jarlabanke's Bridge, an 11th-century causeway built by a Viking chieftain to announce his power. Runestones carved nearby still carry his name and family records—it's the kind of thing that makes the Viking Age feel less like a textbook chapter and more like a time when people left their mark on stone because they wanted to be remembered. After that comes Arkils tingstad, a Viking assembly site in Vallentuna where local communities gathered to settle disputes and make laws. The stones are still arranged in a square pattern, and your guide walks you through how early Scandinavian governance actually worked, standing in the same space where it happened. You'll also see Täby Church, a 13th-century building that shows the shift from pagan to Christian Sweden, and stop at Lake Vallentuna to get a sense of the landscape these people moved through.

Then there's Granby, where you step inside the foundations of a preserved Viking longhouse—one of the best-preserved in the world—and read the Granby Rune Stone, which is basically a thousand-year-old inheritance document carved in stone. If the tour includes a Swedish fika (a coffee-and-pastry break, available on most departures), it happens here at a small farmhouse shop run by relatives of the farm owners, which adds a layer of continuity that feels right. After that, the day moves to Sigtuna, Sweden's oldest town, founded in AD 980, where you walk cobblestone streets lined with wooden and stone buildings, including St. Mary's Church. It's quieter than Stockholm, and the lakeside setting on Mälaren gives you room to breathe and absorb what you've seen.

The final stop is Uppsala, where the cathedral dominates the skyline. Uppsala Domkyrka is Gothic, soaring, and holds the tomb of Gustav Vasa, the king who led the Swedish Reformation. Just outside the city is Gamla Uppsala—the Old Uppsala mounds—three burial mounds from the 6th and 7th centuries traditionally linked to legendary Swedish kings. Standing in front of them, you're looking at monuments that predate the Viking Age itself. The whole day is structured so that each stop adds context to the others: you see how Vikings governed, how they lived, how they marked their dead, and how Christianity reshaped the landscape. Your professional guide ties it together with historical detail at each location, and the minibus means you're not navigating public transport or driving yourself through unfamiliar roads.

What’s included

Your day includes hotel pickup and drop-off within central Stockholm, all-day minibus transport with a professional guide, and entry to all sites visited: Täby Church, Jarlabanke's Bridge, Arkils tingstad, Lake Vallentuna, the Granby Rune Stone and Viking longhouse, Sigtuna, Uppsala Cathedral, and Gamla Uppsala royal mounds.
A Swedish fika is available on most departures at the Granby farmhouse.
Lunch is not included, but time to eat is built into stops at Sigtuna and Uppsala.

Good to know

Easy physical levelPublic transport nearby

Operated by STOEX

Is this one for you?Book this if you want to understand Viking and medieval Sweden beyond what a museum can show—seeing the actual sites where people governed, lived, and were buried makes the history stick in a way a guided walk through Stockholm never does. The fixed itinerary and included transport mean you don't have to plan the route or figure out which sites matter most.