Stockholm, Sweden

Stockholm spreads across fourteen islands where the freshwater of Lake Mälaren spills into the brackish Baltic, and water is everywhere — a third of the city is waterways and another third green space, making it one of Europe's cleanest and most beautiful capitals. Its historic heart is Gamla Stan, the small island of the medieval Old Town: a maze of cobbled lanes, ochre-and-rust gabled houses and church spires around the grand Royal Palace and the sloping square of Stortorget, home to the Nobel Prize Museum. Across a bridge, the leafy island of Djurgården holds the city's headline museums — above all the Vasa Museum, built around a vast, almost perfectly preserved 17th-century warship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1628 and was raised three centuries later, Scandinavia's most visited museum — alongside the open-air folk museum and zoo of Skansen, the joyful ABBA Museum, and the modern-art and photography of nearby Fotografiska. The lakeside City Hall (Stadshuset), where the Nobel Prize banquet is held, offers a tower climb and a waterfront walk; Södermalm, the hip southern island, brings vintage shops, the design boutiques of SoFo, hilltop viewpoints and a buzzing café and bar scene. Swedish fika — the institution of coffee and a cinnamon bun — punctuates every day, and the city's design, fashion and food (from the new Nordic tables to the meatballs-and-lingonberry classics and the cellar restaurants of the Old Town) are a pleasure throughout. Even the metro is an attraction, its cavern stations painted and sculpted into 'the world's longest art gallery'. And just beyond the city lies the Stockholm Archipelago — some 30,000 islands, skerries and islets reached by a fleet of summer ferries, the perfect day trip or overnight escape onto the water. Stockholm is glorious in the long days of summer (May to August) for archipelago and island life, and atmospheric in the dark, candle-lit, snowy depths of winter.