Sofiero Palace

Prince Oscar of Sweden, Princess Sofia of Nassau and their children spent the summer of 1864 at Kulla Gunnarstorp on the Öresund. The princess and the eldest son, the future Gustaf V, were both sickly and in need of fresh air. The couple took to a parsonage farm nearby called Skrabelycke, with its view across to Denmark and a wooded ravine dropping to the water, and bought it in September 1864 under a new name, Sophie-Ro. The roof trusses of the six-towered summer villa they raised there went up in April 1865, and the family moved down from Stockholm in July 1866.

Oscar became king in 1872 on the death of his brother Karl XV. He and Sofia went on summering at Sofiero, but a reigning couple brought a larger household with them, and with four growing princes the one-storey villa was too small. A rebuilding begun in June 1874 and finished in 1876 left the house two storeys high with 35 rooms, service space aside.

The Scanian aristocracy visited often, and foreign royalty with them: Tsar Alexander was a guest in 1893, and Edward VII of Britain came in 1901 on informal terms. Visits by the king and queen grew rarer through the 1890s. The queen was prescribed dry forest air rather than the salt winds of the Öresund, and the king took to travelling on the royal vessel Drott, becoming a regular at Marstrand. Oscar and Sofia last stayed at Sofiero together during the Helsingborg exhibition of 1903.

When Oscar's grandson Prince Gustaf Adolf married Margaret of Great Britain in 1905, the king and queen gave them Sofiero as a wedding present; the couple arrived on 22 July. Margaret replaced the heavy, dark Oscarian interiors with something lighter.

The grounds she inherited were neglected and barely laid out: a great lawn east of the house, a fruit and kitchen garden, and a ravine of rough ground her contemporaries thought gloomy. Working from the English Arts and Crafts garden ideal, in 1910 she laid out the blomstergatan, borders at least five metres wide, each planted with quantities of a single flower and sheltered by a trellis of hops, honeysuckle, clematis and vine. Her books Vår trädgård på Sofiero (1915) and Från blomstergården (1917), and her flower street at the Baltic Exhibition in Malmö in 1914, presented the modern English garden in Sweden. Margaret died in 1920.

Gustaf Adolf married Louise Mountbatten in 1923. He shared his first wife's interest in gardening, and in the 1930s began collecting rhododendrons; the collection came to run to almost five hundred varieties. A nursery worked at Sofiero until his death, in collaboration with the Gothenburg botanical garden and Kew among others. Fruit trees had gone in under Oscar II, and the harvest reached 26 tonnes a year at its height; most was sold, though into the 1960s much was still made into jam and juice in the castle kitchen and sent to Stockholm by train. Much of the estate's 80 tunnland of cultivated land was sold to the city of Helsingborg in 1964.

He became king as Gustaf VI Adolf in 1950 on the death of Gustaf V, and until 1973 Sofiero was his and Louise's official summer residence. Jawaharlal Nehru was received here in 1957, Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1962 and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1963.

By a will dated 7 December 1959 the king left Sofiero to the city of Helsingborg, on condition that it maintain the park and gardens for all time in substantially their existing form and keep them open to the public on reasonable terms. The park could not be altered; the buildings could be changed or even demolished, the castle by then being in poor repair. Gustaf VI Adolf died on 15 September 1973 in Helsingborg hospital. Accepting the gift was not a foregone conclusion: some argued it would cost ratepayers dearly, and republicans objected on principle, but the council voted to take it on the king's terms.

The park opened to the public in May 1974, and almost 150,000 people came that first summer. The first exhibition followed in 1978, and in 1979 the soprano Birgit Nilsson drew 5,000 people to the first concert; it was ruled that same year that Sofiero may not be used for commercial purposes. In 2010 a jury of experts from six countries named the castle park Europe's most beautiful. Since 1 January 2015 the estate has been run by the municipal company Helsingborg Arena och Scen, the castle itself holding a restaurant, café and at times a gallery. Sofia's bridge, 57 metres across the ravine, was opened on 14 April 2018 and won the Swedish steel building prize in 2021.