Voyage to Drottningholm Palace – Joel’s Journeys & Jaunts

Apart from tomorrow, when I’ll head to the airport for my flight back, this is my last morning in Sweden. What better way to combat the touring fatigue I mentioned yesterday than to accept an invitation to spend a couple of hours at a palace out of the city, Drottningholm?

Okay. It wasn’t exactly an invitation, at least not an exclusive one. It was more of a “if you, or any other schlub for that matter, pay the required amount of money, you can visit, but only to those parts where the plebs are occasionally permitted to go; and don’t get uppity while you’re there” sort of thing.

Drottningholm is on an island west of Stockholm. It’s the summer palace of the Swedish royals.

Of course, the royals have a summer palace. You wouldn’t want them to have to be cooped up in the same immense palace all year round, would you? How boring.

After some of the poshest travel imaginable on state visits, it must be nice to have a palace big enough to get lost in to come home to. Just not the same palace all year long. Perish the thought.

When Drottningholm Palace was built, the only way to get there was by boat. That’s sort of how islands generally work. However, it’s a big island that, at least now, I don’t know about then, contains more than Drottningholm Palace, and there are now roads on it and bridges to it.

I believe that I could have taken a bus to Drottningholm, but it would have required one or two transfers.

You probably gathered from the phrase “I believe that I could have taken” that I didn’t take the bus. One or two companies run ferries from Stockholm to Drottningholm.

I got a ferry from a dock about a ten-minute walk from my hotel. The ferry took roughly 45 minutes to get to the palace.

From Stockholm, the ferry to Drottningholm goes in the opposite direction along Lake Mälaren than the Stockholm Archipelago Tour I took the other day. So I got to see some of the archipelago that I didn’t see on that tour.

To be honest, I’m not clear on the boundaries of Lake Mälaren. Stockholm sits on the archipelago. I don’t know if the channels between the islands are considered rivers or if they’re part of the lake. The reason I said Drottingholm is along Lake Mälaren is that the company that runs the ferry I took promoted the journey as being on Lake Mälaren.

Once the ferry got past the built-up parts of Stockholm, the shores turned largely into forests and hills. Here and there, there were clumps of buildings. One or two of the clumps were big enough to possibly be small towns. Some were more like villages or hamlets. And there were some isolated residences.

I sat on a bench on an outside deck on the boat and enjoyed the scenery as it passed by. I know what you’re thinking, the boat passed by the scenery, not the other way around. But this is my travel journal, so everything is relative to me. I sat still. Therefore, the scenery must have passed by me.

Whatever. It was an enjoyable 45-minute cruise. (The company said that it would take one hour. But they run the ferry every hour, and there’s a fifteen-minute turnaround time. I’d complain about not getting my money’s worth. But it is promoted as a means to get to Drottningholm, not as a sightseeing cruise. So, on that basis, shorter is better.

And then, before the boat approached the dock, the large orangey-sand palace loomed up on the shore.

At Drottningholm

A sign near the palace said that the Dowager Queen Hedvig Eleonora bought Drottningholm in 1661, but it burned down a few months later. Not a lucky lady, was she?

“She then undertook the most costly palace construction in Sweden — the new Drottningholm was to reflect the fact that Sweden was a Great Power.”

Splashing around all that money on a new palace might have worked in the 17th century, but now the royals help to pay the bills by selling tickets for commoners to visit a portion of their palaces. That hardly screams “Great Power,” does it?

The ticket gets the likes of me into a very small portion of Drottningholm Palace, only about a dozen or so rooms. I don’t know how many rooms there are in total in the palace, but look at the exterior picture I posted of it. A dozen or so rooms doesn’t nearly begin to cover it.

The path that the public must follow goes through a guardroom or two, a couple of drawing rooms, a couple of bedchambers, and some halls. (That’s halls as in large rooms, not halls as in hallways.) All of them, even the guardrooms, are lavishly decorated, with lots of paintings on the walls.

I’ll post pictures of a couple of the rooms and a couple of the paintings. But let me highlight just one painting. It’s in a room called “The Ehrenstrahl Drawing Room,” so named because, to quote from a sign in the room, “the Swedish court painter David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, whose allegorical paintings from 1692-1695 still adorn the walls of the room.”

I couldn’t find any placards assigning titles to the paintings in that room, but the same sign said of the painting I want to draw attention to that it “depicts the accession of Karl XI, where Queen Hedvig Eleonora hands over the power to him.” Never mind the queen turning over power to a king. I didn’t bother to try to learn more about that handover. So I don’t know if misogyny was involved.

What I wanted to point out is the children at the bottom right of the picture. I took a zoomed-in picture of them. Notice that one of them is looking upward with a confused, but almost reproving look on his face as if he is thinking, “Why, Mommy? Why are you doing this and, more importantly, why do I have to be here?”

There’s also a library on the prescribed route through the rooms. It’s a long, narrow room with bookshelves on one side and a long table with chandeliers above it in the middle of the room, running for most of the room’s length. Sitting on the table are several small human-form statues lined up in a row. All of them face in the same direction. If you’re going to sit in the library, you should have a friend you can talk to who won’t talk back.

Out behind the palace, the estate grounds are large, with a lovely park beside them. The estate grounds have carefully laid-out gardens, fountains, and some hedges trimmed like fat monoliths.

On either side of the gardens are rows of trees that are perfectly aligned. I don’t think any of the centres of the trees’ straight trunks stand more than a centimetre off an imaginary straight line through them.

There are also some significantly less disciplined wooded areas.

Toward the back of the estate, off to the side, there’s the “Chinese Pavilion.” It was a surprise birthday present for Queen Lovisa Ulrika that King Adolf Fredrik had secretly built in 1753 (or, more likely, secretly directed to be built) as a “Chinese-style pleasure palace.” Imagine living on an estate that is big enough that you don’t notice that your husband is building a multi-room pavilion for you on the back of the estate.

My condo has a tiny patio. If I am around and anyone so much as sets a foot on it, let alone tries to build something on it, I’d see them.

The Chinese pavilion has two levels. There are only a few rooms on each level. Most are decorated with chinoiserie. The public is allowed to enter all of the rooms. That is to say, they can enter if they pay the additional fee. I bought a combo ticket that got me into both the castle and the Chinese pavilion.

There are also a couple of small, separate buildings close to the Chinese pavilion. One contains a single room, an intimate dining room. That was closed to the public, but we could look in through a glass door. A sign by the door said that it is attached to an almost adjoining stone building, which was the kitchen. They brought food into the dining room through what must have been a tunnel, because they could raise the food up through a trapdoor in the floor.

The former kitchen is now a small cafe. I had an early, uninspiring lunch there and, after having spent close to two hours at Drottningham, made my way to the dock to catch the ferry back to the city.