We walked off into a city that feels like Copenhagen and Oslo had a baby who smiles more – which makes sense, because Gothenburg was born from necessity and stubbornness. Back in 1607, King Charles IX planted Sweden's first settlement here on the island of Hisingen, a narrow strip of land squeezed between Danish Halland to the south and Norwegian Bohuslän to the north. This was Sweden's only gateway to the North Sea and the Atlantic, and the Danes knew it. The Kalmar War of 1611-1613 destroyed that first town completely.

But King Gustav II Adolf – Gustavus Adolphus to the rest of Europe – wasn't giving up on Sweden's western window. In 1619 he refounded the city, and in 1621 he granted it a royal charter, christening it Göteborg. Here's the beautiful twist: he invited Dutch merchants to build it, and they came in such numbers that Dutch became the official language within the town walls. The first Gothenburg was a Dutch enclave on Swedish soil, speaking Dutch in their church-shaped warehouses along canals that reminded them of home. Walking through the old city center, you can still see their fingerprints – the canals, the pragmatic grid, the no-nonsense mercantile spirit.

Today Gothenburg is Sweden's second-largest city – roughly 600,000 souls in the city proper, over a million in the metro area – and the largest port in the Nordic countries. That Atlantic gateway the kings fought for? Still here, still humming. In 1927, Volvo was founded on Hisingen, the very island where Charles IX first planted his flag. The first Volvo automobile rolled off the line that same year, and both Volvo Cars and Volvo Group are still headquartered here. You can feel the industrial pride mixed with that Dutch practicality – this is a city that builds things and ships them out.

We had lunch at the Feskekôrka fish church – literally a church-shaped market built in 1874, smelling of fresh shrimp and dill and North Sea salt. Our räkmacka was a shrimp mountain on bread so high it needed a fork, eaten at the counter while fishermen unloaded the morning catch behind us. This is what four centuries of Atlantic trade tastes like.

In the afternoon we took the ferry to the southern archipelago – car-free islands, red boathouses, sauna jumps into 18°C water followed by cinnamon buns. These islands were the outer defense line for that precious gateway port, and now they're where Gothenburgers go to remember what silence sounds like. We went to Liseberg amusement park at golden hour – the wooden roller coaster Balder gave us butterflies and views over the entire city, the port, the islands, the narrow strip of land that changed Scandinavian history. The pros: genuinely Swedish without Stockholm prices or attitude, still shaped by those Dutch merchants who smiled and built and traded. The cons: rain (it did), but Swedes just put on cute raincoats and keep smiling.