Malmö's Old Town and the Turning Torso
Leave the van and walk into Gamla Staden, where two squares set the tempo. Stortorget is the grand one, ringed by the old town hall and the 16th-century Residenset; tucked behind it, café-lined Lilla Torg keeps its half-timbered merchant houses and cobbles from Malmö's Hanseatic, herring-trading heyday. It is a small, flat, eminently walkable centre, best taken slowly with a coffee and a kanelbulle before you drive anywhere.
A short walk northwest, the old shipyards of Västra Hamnen have become Malmö's glass-and-water showpiece, and Santiago Calatrava's Turning Torso is its exclamation mark: 190 metres and 54 storeys of white, nine cubes of five floors each rotating a full 90 degrees from pavement to roof. Finished in 2005, it remains the tallest building in the Nordics and the shot that fixes a photo unmistakably in Malmö. Frame it from the Daniaparken seafront or the Sundspromenaden boardwalk, with the strait and the bridge behind.
The Øresund Bridge and a Day in Copenhagen
The crossing to Denmark is half the fun. The Øresundsbron link runs roughly 16 kilometres from the Lernacken shore: an 8-kilometre stretch of motorway and railway, of which a 7.85-kilometre cable-stayed bridge is the longest of its kind in Europe, before the road slips onto the artificial island of Peberholm and dives into the four-kilometre Drogden Tunnel under the shipping lane. Central Copenhagen sits about 30 kilometres beyond, a 35-minute drive once you clear the toll.
Price it in before you go. In 2026 the regular one-way rate for a car or campervan under six metres is around DKK 470 (roughly SEK 720 or 65 euros), payable by card at the booths; book online for about 10 percent off, or load an ØresundGO tag for far less if you will cross more than once. Note the length cut-off, as a motorhome of six metres or more jumps to roughly DKK 970. Park on the Danish side and the city is yours on foot: the painted gables and quayside bars of Nyhavn, a turn through Christianshavn, then back over the water as the light goes long over the strait.
Ribersborg and the Falsterbo Beaches
Malmö's own beach is a five-minute drive from the centre. Locals call it Ribban; the maps say Ribersborgsstranden, a long ribbon of imported sand with water so shallow you wade out a hundred metres before it reaches your waist, which makes it gentle for children. Out on its pier stands Ribersborgs Kallbadhus, a wooden open-air bathhouse from 1898 with five saunas and ladders straight down into the Öresund, men and women bathing separately and, by tradition, without swimsuits.
For something wilder, point the van 35 kilometres southwest to Skanör and Falsterbo on the Falsterbonäset, the sandy spit that forms the southwesternmost tip of Sweden. The west-facing beach runs for kilometres of pale dune-backed sand dotted with candy-coloured bathing huts; the sea stays warm and waist-deep far out, the sky is enormous, and there is room to leave the van and let an afternoon drift. In autumn the headland turns into one of Europe's great raptor-watching points as migrating birds funnel south.
Ystad and Österlen: Ale's Stones and Vineyards
Head east and the landscape softens into Österlen, the orchard-and-rapeseed corner of Skåne. Ystad is the obvious base: hundreds of pastel half-timbered houses, among the finest concentrations in Sweden, packed around Stortorget and the 13th-century St Mary's Church, from whose tower a watchman still sounds his horn through the small hours to signal all is well. Readers of Henning Mankell will recognise every cobbled corner as Kurt Wallander's beat.
A few minutes along the coast, climb the cliff above the fishing village of Kåseberga to Ales Stenar, Sweden's largest stone ship: 59 boulders laid out 67 metres long on a windswept ridge above the Baltic, raised around 600 AD and at their most haunting in low evening sun. Then taste what the warm Österlen soil grows: tank-fresh apple must and cider at Kiviks Musteri, the Åkesson family orchard planted in 1888 as Sweden's first commercial fruit farm, and a glass at the region's young vineyards, among them Köpingsbergs and Skepparps.
Lund and Kullaberg
Twenty minutes north, Lund repays a slow wander. Its sandstone cathedral, begun in 1104 and consecrated in 1145, is the foremost piece of Romanesque architecture in the Nordics, and inside it keeps the Horologium Mirabile Lundense, an astronomical clock of about 1424 that performs twice a day: two knights strike the hour with their swords, In dulci jubilo plays, and the Three Kings file past the Madonna and Child. Add Scandinavia's second-oldest university and lanes of crooked cottages behind rose-filled gardens, and a half-day fills itself.
For sea air and open rock, drive an hour or so up to Kullaberg, a knuckle of cliffs, caves and hidden coves jutting into the Kattegat. Footpaths cross the reserve to Kullens fyr, Sweden's highest-set lighthouse and the most powerful in Scandinavia, its beam thrown some 50 kilometres out to sea, while boats run harbour-porpoise safaris from the old Belle Époque resort of Mölle below. Wide, salt-scoured and free to roam, it makes a fitting last stop before you turn the van south again.
