I visited the Swedish town of Alingsås with bakeries, hiking and no crowds ...Middle East

There’s something surreal about boarding a train at Gothenburg station, which serves 27 million passengers annually, and disembarking 40 minutes later in Alingsås, a pretty Swedish town and municipality with a population of around 40,000.

This number swells in early October, when up to 90,000 visitors flock here for Lights in Alingsås, Sweden’s largest light festival. Outside of these times, tourists are generally few and far between. Yet it is a beautifully preserved lakeside trästaden, the name given to Swedish towns with certain characteristics, including wooden houses from the 17th to 19th century. The quiet streets and green spaces such as Nolhaga park, which stretches from the town centre to Lake Mjörn, make a stay here even more enjoyable.

Alingsås is considered the birthplace of Swedes’ much-loved coffee-and-cake fix – or fika. Trästaden, also known as fikastaden (fika towns), typically have many bakeries and cafés, which in Alingsås are intrinsic to the area’s story.

In the 1700s, Alingsås was an industrial hub, churning out textiles that were exported worldwide, while local women fuelled the expanding workforce by baking at home. Soon, they were running many of the town’s arbetarfik (workers’ cafés).

I learn more during a guided fika tour with the local tourism board. It offers a deep dive into this key part of Swedish culture – the coffee-and-snack break. Stops along the tour include Ekstedts Bageri & Café, where bakers once made the world’s largest semla (cardamom bun) and the ridiculously cosy Nygrens Café, which dates back to the 1700s, and is famous for championing Swedish ingredients – flour comes from a local mill, and coffee from a nearby coffee roastery.

One thing is clear – Swedes take their fika seriously. I learn that, typically, one is taken in the morning and another in the afternoon. Bosses wouldn’t dare restrict these, if only because they often attend themselves; during fika, problems are resolved over coffee and cake.

At times, fika was an act of resistance; there were periods when local authorities, fearing these gatherings doubled as opportunities to sow seeds of discontent, demanded that locals bring their coffee pots to the town centre to be destroyed in front of large crowds.

“Fika is about democracy,” says Gunilla Davidsson, who works for the West Sweden tourist board and whose role involves promoting and preserving fika as an intrinsic part of the country’s heritage. She explains that it isn’t just a chance to reconnect with loved ones, but to air grievances in a setting where everyone is equal.

We meet at Ekstedts Bageri & Café, where Simon and Linda Ström are the owners of a business founded in 1886. Today, this cinnamon-scented bakery and café, with its cobbled courtyard, mismatched furniture and cosy, trinket-filled nooks, is one of Alingsås’s most popular fika spots. Cinnamon buns are the must-have item, says Linda, who, like many of the town’s bakers, isn’t simply feeding people but serving up a slice of nostalgia.

“When I was little, my grandmother would make cinnamon buns and we’d go to the beach for a fika. It’s about getting together with family.”

Simon admits that there are years when business is tough. “In Gothenburg, where bakeries buy ingredients in bulk, you can get a mass-produced cinnamon bun for €1 (87p). Ours are more expensive, but they’re made with love. Sometimes, our profit is next to nothing, but we’re doing what we love every single day.”

Linda invites me to help her make princess cake, a Swedish classic featuring a dome of grass-green marzipan over sponge cake, jam, vanilla custard and whipped cream. It’s trickier than I thought; I struggle to sculpt the marzipan over the layers of sponge without ruining its trademark shape. In the time it takes me to smooth the marzipan, Linda has not only finished her cake but topped it with a tiny red sugar rose.

Later, when a fresh version appears at my table, I’m given the honour of cutting the first piece. The cakes are served at events such as birthdays, and being the first to slice into the thick marzipan is a privilege.

The princess cake isn’t my only baking experience in Alingsås. On the outskirts of town, in a beautiful lakeside cabin nudging up against a tangle of hiking trails, I meet Rob. A Scottish transplant and keen baker, Rob moved here almost here almost a decade ago and is now part of the tourist board’s “meet the locals” scheme.

He shows me how to make hallongrottor, otherwise known as thumbprint cookies – crunchy delights containing a pool of raspberry jam. As we sip our coffee and watch a peregrine falcon swoop over the lake, Rob tells me how he loves the vast expanse of wilderness outside Alingsås, how he once saw a wolf trotting past his cabin and that he occasionally (just occasionally) misses a good old Glaswegian pub.

Afterwards, I go for a fika-fuelled hike along the trails that weave from around both Alingsås and the nearby lakes – vast expanses of water fringed by thick swathes of ancient pines. It takes me just five minutes to reach these shimmering bodies of water from Alingsås’s centre.

As with many Swedish towns, many of its clapboard houses are ochre-coloured, a nod to the time when buildings would be daubed with paint containing leftover pigment from Sweden’s copper mines. By the time I arrive back in the town centre it’s getting dark, but every house has a light positioned in the window, creating an aura of cosiness.

The next day, over more slices of princess cake at the 150-year-old Grand Hotel Alingsås, with its lemon-yellow exterior and encyclopaedic selection of teas, local fika fan Laura excitedly tells me that the town’s cafés and restaurants will soon start setting up their tables and chairs outside – a real sign of spring.

This part of the world has long, dark winters, and when it is pitch black by 3pm and the temperature seldom rises above 15°C, it is coffee and cake that sees people through.“We have to have some kind of addiction,” says Laura.

How to get there

British Airways, Norwegian and Ryanair fly from the UK to Gothenburg, a 40-minute train journey from Alingsås.

Where to stay

B&B doubles at the Grand Hotel Alingsås start from £136

More information

The writer was a guest of the West Sweden tourism board (vastsverige.com)

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