Malmö

Stand in Malmö's old town and you are really standing in old Denmark. For most of its history this was a Danish port, the second city of the kingdom, shipping salted herring across northern Europe. Its red-brick castle, Malmöhus, was a royal fortress and a mint — and, for a while, a prison. When the Scottish nobleman James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell and third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, fled into exile, he was locked up here in 1567 and years later died, insane, in a Danish cell. Only in 1658, after a Swedish army marched across a frozen sea, was the whole province of Skåne handed to Sweden — and the townspeople had to learn to be Swedes.

Three centuries later Malmö reinvented itself as a city of iron and smoke. The Kockums shipyard built some of the largest tankers in the world, and its towering gantry crane became the skyline. Then, in the 1970s and 80s, the orders dried up, the yard closed, and thousands lost their work. In 2002 the crane was sold to a Korean shipbuilder for a symbolic one dollar; as it was dismantled and shipped east, locals watched from the shore and nicknamed it "the Tears of Malmö."

What rose in its place is the city travellers meet today. On the old shipyard land Santiago Calatrava twisted a 190-metre tower, the Turning Torso, into the sky, and the Öresund Bridge stitched Malmö to Copenhagen so tightly that thousands cross for work each morning. A third of residents were born abroad, and their kitchens made the city Sweden's unofficial capital of falafel. From the tough Rosengård estate came Zlatan Ibrahimović, the swaggering striker who became the country's greatest footballer — a fitting emblem for a place that keeps remaking itself.