Vasa Museum Guided Tour with Entry Ticket Stockholm

The Vasa warship

At the heart of the Vasa Museum stands the warship Vasa, built in Stockholm in the 1620s as the pride of the Swedish navy. About 95 per cent of the ship is original, making it the best-preserved 17th-century ship ever salvaged. The hull rises through several floors of the museum hall, and from different levels you can see the gun ports, the rigging and the tall stern.

Your guide helps you read the ship like a book. The hundreds of carved sculptures, from lions and warriors to Roman emperors and sea creatures, were designed to impress allies and frighten enemies. Seeing them in the dim, carefully controlled light of the hall, with someone explaining what each figure meant, is the best way to understand why the Vasa Museum is the most visited museum in Scandinavia.

The story of the sinking in 1628

Vasa was commissioned when Sweden was building a Baltic empire and was at war. The king wanted a powerful, heavily armed ship, and changes to the design added weight high up in the hull. Your guide explains the warnings about the ship's stability that were ignored before launch, including a test in which sailors ran from side to side across the deck.

On 10 August 1628 Vasa set sail on its maiden voyage from Stockholm harbour. After less than a nautical mile a gust of wind made the ship heel over, water poured in through the open gun ports and it sank in front of crowds on the shore. The inquiry that followed found no one guilty. Hearing this story beside the ship itself brings the drama to life.

The salvage and the museum we see today

For more than three centuries Vasa lay at the bottom of the harbour, where the cold, brackish water of the Baltic protected the wood from the shipworm that destroys wrecks in saltier seas. On this tour you see the 19th-century maps that helped locate the wreck and learn how divers dug tunnels beneath the hull to pass lifting cables under it.

In 1961 the ship broke the surface again, and years of conservation followed to stop the waterlogged oak from cracking as it dried. The current Vasa Museum opened in 1990, built around the ship. Your guide explains the engineering of the salvage and the daily work of keeping the ship stable, so you leave knowing how the museum came to be.

Djurgården and how to get to the Vasa Museum

The Vasa Museum stands on Djurgården, the green royal park island in the centre of Stockholm, near Skansen open-air museum and the Nordic Museum. The easiest way to get there is by tram 7 from the city centre, by the ferry to Djurgården, or on foot along the Strandvägen waterfront in about 20 minutes from Östermalm.

Plan your Vasa Museum tour for the morning in the main season or for the 14:30 afternoon tour all year. After the guided visit you are free to stay in the museum and explore the exhibitions on each level at your own pace, including the scale model of the ship in its original colours. Many visitors then walk along the island's waterfront and parks.