Gävle

Every Advent, Gävle raises a monumental straw Yule Goat on Slottstorget, the castle square — a tradition running since 1966 that has made the city's winter unmistakably its own. Behind it, the wooden lanes of Gamla Gefle keep the older city that survived the great fire.

The Gävle Goat is Sweden's most famous piece of seasonal public art: a giant Yule Goat built of straw to an official design each December — a seasonal centrepiece the whole country watches, not least for the years vandals have famously burned it. The rest of the city rewards the trip in any month. Gamla Gefle — the old town that survived the fire of 1869 which levelled much of Gävle — keeps wooden houses in ochre and rust along cobbled lanes, and the Prison Museum occupies genuine cell blocks nearby. The city sits on the Bothnian coast, ninety minutes north of Stockholm by train, with boat trips threading the offshore islands in summer. But December is the season with a story: the goat rises, the market lights come on, and the town gathers.