Dalarna (Lake Siljan Region)

Lake Siljan fills a meteorite crater 370 million years old, though the landscape has long since softened the impact into forested hills, red-painted villages, and water so still it doubles the sky. Midsummer celebrations here are Sweden's most traditional — the maypole goes up, the fiddlers start, and the dancing continues until the light fails, which in June it never quite does.

The Lake Siljan region in Dalarna is considered the cultural heartland of Sweden — the place where Dala horses are carved, folk music is played without irony, and midsummer traditions have been maintained without interruption for centuries. The lake itself sits in the Siljan Ring, a geological structure created by one of the largest meteorite impacts in European history. Villages around the shore — Leksand, Rättvik, Mora — each hold their own midsummer celebrations, folk music festivals, and church boat races. Stuga (cabin) rentals along the lakeshore come with private jetties and rowing boats. Anders Zorn's paintings captured this landscape in the late nineteenth century; the Zorn Museum in Mora preserves both his work and his home.