Gränna

Gränna climbs a ridge above Lake Vättern, its main street lined with polkagris workshops where red-and-white rock has been pulled by hand since 1859. Sugar and mint drift from open doorways. Below, the ferry to car-free Visingsö comes and goes, the island a green stripe across the water.

Gränna runs on two stories, one sweet and one heroic-tragic. The sweet one is polkagris: striped peppermint rock invented here by the widow Amalia Eriksson in 1859, still boiled, striped and pulled by hand in workshops you can walk straight into. The other is Salomon August Andrée, the local engineer who lifted off for the North Pole by hydrogen balloon in 1897 and vanished; the expedition's remains — and its haunting undeveloped-then-developed photographs — surfaced on White Island in 1930, and the Grenna Museum tells the whole doomed, magnificent story. Between candy and catastrophe, the ridge gives long views over Vättern, and the ferry hums to Visingsö every half hour or so. Fifteen walkable minutes end to end, and both stories stick.