Cool Golf Around Stockholm

Uncover a variety of great golfing and off-course attractions

- Andrew Marshall

Since the first Swedish golf club, Gothenburg, was founded in 1902 and quickly followed two years later by Stockholm’s Golf Klub, the popularity of the sport has grown dramatically. During the 1990's, the emergence of home-grown talent such as Annika Sörenstam and Jesper Parnevik with his upturned baseball cap, skin-tight Johan Lindeberg trousers and a penchant for eating volcanic dust, really started to raise the profile of Swedish golf. In recent years, players such as sunglass-loving Henrik Stenson, Robert Karlsson, David Linmerth, Jonas Blixt and Alexander Noren have continued to raise Swedish golf awareness.

Although plenty of Swedish pros play every week on the PGA and European tours, Sweden is often curiously overlooked as a golfing destination. The season may be short (generally around April to October) but few countries can boast the variety of golfing experiences on offer here. During summer, night owls can tee off at midnight in northern Sweden with most golf courses open round the clock during June and July. Elsewhere in the country teeing off at 7pm and squeezing in 18 holes before dusk is no problem, weather permitting.

A game for all ages

Here, golf is a passion and it’s difficult to meet a Swede that doesn’t play game. With a population of about nine million people, around six percent play the game, the highest percentage in the world. Even more remarkable is that about a third of this figure are female. This is partly due to Svenska Golfförbundet (the Swedish Golf Federation), which has established a number of innovative programs to recruit and assist young players. One of them is ‘Girls & Golf’, aimed at drumming up interest among 7- to 18-year-olds by creating a social atmosphere in which to play and placing less emphasis on competitiveness.