| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
The Adelsö landscape consists of pine-clad rocky hills and
moraine ridges varied with fields and beautiful leaf trees, mostly oaks. The highest spot on Adelsö is Kunsta mountain with its 53.2m above the sea level. The top of Kunsta mountain has a beautiful outlook tower which offers a great view of the middle of lake Mälaren.
The permanent residents is around 700 people, a number that has been quite stable through out the centuries. Most of the working force today commute to Stockholm but there are also a lot of farmers and a couple of active fishermen. During the summer months, a lot of summer guests comes to the island, making its atmosphere more lively.
The transportations to Adelsö are very good. Busses (line 311 and 312) start out from the bus terminal Brommaplan in the middle of
Bromma and goes to the ferry berth Sjöängen on Munsö .Buss number 312 takes the car ferry and goes around the whole island. The ferry goes every half hour during the days and every hour during the evenings and nights. The night ferries goes more seldom during the summer months.
The history of Adelsö starts with the stone age. Adelsö was on that time only some smaller islands which was rising from the sea since the end of the ice age. Lake Mälaren with its
freshwater did not yet exist so the skerriesA skerry is a small, rocky island, usually defined to be too small for habitation. It may simply be a rocky reef. In English this this is considered to be a dialect word, from the Orkneys; but it is a term more used in Scandinavian skar , there being a co that wasto become Adelsö lay in a bay of the Baltic SeaThe Baltic Sea is in northeastern Europe, bounded by the Scandinavian Peninsula, the mainland of east and central Europe, and the Danish islands. It drains into the Kattegat and the North Sea by way of the Oresund, the Great Belt and the Small Belt. It is.
Fishing, bird and sealOtariidae Phocidae Odobenidae Pinnipeds are large marine mammals belonging to the Pinnipedia a family (sometimes a suborder or superfamily, depending on the classification scheme) of the order Carnivora. The true seals, sea lions, fur seals and Walrus are hunting created the foundation for the life of the people living there. Graves from the older and younger stone ages exist, but most of the gravefields comes from the Iron AgeIn mythology, the Iron Age is the age following the golden, silver and bronze ages and characterized by a general degeneration of talent and virtue, and of literary excellence. In Roman literature the Iron Age is commonly regarded as beginning after the t, mostly the Viking AgeThe Viking Age is the name of the period between 793 A. D and 1066 A. D in Scandinavia. This corresponds to the latter half of the early Iron Age. During this period, Scandinavian warriors and traders, called Vikings, traded, raided, plundered, and explor. There are also two ancient hillforts (fornborgar) on Adelsö, one of them, situated on Skansberget near Stenby is unusally well preserved.
Adelsö, earlier called Alsnö or Alsnu and the great royal mounds (Kungshögarna) at Hovgården shows the importance of Adlesö during the Viking AgeThe Viking Age is the name of the period between 793 A. D and 1066 A. D in Scandinavia. This corresponds to the latter half of the early Iron Age. During this period, Scandinavian warriors and traders, called Vikings, traded, raided, plundered, and explor. The king lived on the King's House (Kungsgården) next to Hovgården on Adelsö and ruled from there over the greatest Viking city of the time, Birka. During the latter part of the
12th century a christian church was build next to Hovgården and Birger Jarl's sons built Alsnöhus , a splendied castle whereking Magnus I of Sweden in 1279 called for the Meeting of Alsnö. At that meeting the Alsnö stadga was estblished, introducing the privilegies of the Swedish nobility.
During the middle ages, Alsnöhus was used as a summer palace for kings and governors but it fell later into ruin. What is left of the castle and several graves near Hovgården was dug up during extensive archological investigations conducted between 1916 and 1926. At the same time as the Birka excavations during the 1990s several excavations was conducted on the area of Hovgården. Birka and Hovgården became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993.