Visby

Where it sits. Visby is the seat of Gotland Municipality, on the west coast of Gotland in the middle of the Baltic Sea, roughly 90 kilometres from the Swedish mainland. It has about 24,000 inhabitants and is the only county seat in Sweden reachable from the mainland solely by boat or plane. The town occupies a limestone slope running down to the sea, so its streets fall towards the harbour and the roofs step downward in tiers. That limestone is the material of everything here: the wall, the churches, the merchant houses and the cliff, known as the klint, that the upper town sits on.

The ring wall and the medieval town. The Ringmuren encircles the old town for 3.4 kilometres and survives with around 27 of its towers standing, the most complete medieval town wall in northern Europe. Construction began in the thirteenth century, replacing an earlier defence, and the oldest surviving element is the Kruttornet, the Powder Tower, dating from the twelfth century. Inside the wall are the ruins of a dozen or more medieval churches: St Nicolai, St Karin on the main square, Drotten, Helge Ands with its octagonal plan. Only Sankta Maria, consecrated in 1225 and now the cathedral of the Diocese of Visby, remains roofed and in use. UNESCO inscribed the town in 1995 as the Hanseatic Town of Visby.

Why so much survived. Visby was a leading Baltic trading town in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, wealthy enough to build in stone when almost everywhere else built in wood. Its decline was equally decisive. In 1361 the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag invaded the island and defeated a peasant army outside the walls; mass graves excavated near the town yielded the remains of hundreds of the dead, many still in their mail, and the finds are among the most important sources for medieval European warfare. Trade shifted, the town stagnated, and stagnation preserved it. The stone houses were never rebuilt because there was no money to rebuild them.

On screen, twice over. Visby's screen history has two distinct chapters. The first is live action: the 1969 Swedish television series of Pippi Longstocking, based on Astrid Lindgren's books, was shot largely on Gotland, with exteriors in the old town including a sweet shop on Fiskargränd and a dress shop on Sankt Hansgatan. Villa Villekulla, Pippi's house, was an old caretaker's cottage outside town, dressed with a painted porch and coloured shutters; it still stands at Kneippbyn, a few kilometres south of Visby. The second chapter is animation. Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli staff photographed Visby and Stockholm on a research trip, and the seaside city of Koriko in Kiki's Delivery Service from 1989 is drawn from that material. Miyazaki had first seen both cities in 1971, on a scouting trip for an unrealised Pippi Longstocking project that Lindgren declined to authorise.

What is actually there today. The old town is a working town rather than an open-air museum, and the pleasure is in walking it without a plan: the lanes are narrow, cobbled and steep, roses grow up house walls in summer, and the ruins appear without warning between ordinary buildings. Stora Torget is the main square, Almedalen the harbourside park where Swedish party leaders speak each summer during Almedalen Week. The Gotlands Museum on Strandgatan holds the picture stones, silver hoards and battle finds that explain the island's Iron Age and Viking wealth. The botanical garden by the wall, laid out in 1855, is planted with species that survive Gotland's unusually mild, dry climate, including mulberry and walnut, and the island's limestone soils support orchid meadows that flower in late May and June.

Medieval Week and the summer swing. For one week in early August the town runs Medeltidsveckan, a medieval festival that has grown since 1984 into one of the largest of its kind in Europe, with markets, tournaments and several thousand costumed participants. In late June, Almedalen Week fills every bed in the county with politicians and lobbyists. Outside those two weeks and the July holiday peak, Visby is quiet, and in winter it is close to empty.

Getting there and timing. Ferries run from Nynäshamn, south of Stockholm, and from Oskarshamn, taking around three hours on the fast vessels; Visby airport has flights from Stockholm, Gothenburg and other Swedish cities. Once on the island, a bicycle is the sensible way to reach the beaches at Tofta, the sea stacks at Lickershamn and Langhammars, and the smaller island of Fårö to the north, where Ingmar Bergman lived from the 1960s until his death in 2007 and shot several of his films, among them Through a Glass Darkly and Persona. Between the ring wall, Kneippbyn and Fårö, Gotland holds three separate and genuinely distinct pieces of screen history within an hour of each other.