Sweden's ancient religious capital and the Nordic world's oldest university city — where three royal Viking burial mounds rise above the plain at Gamla Uppsala, the cathedral holds the tombs of Saint Eric, Gustavus Vasa, and Linnaeus, and the university produced the taxonomic system that named every living thing on earth
Uppsala (240,000; metro 360,000) is 70km north of Stockholm and Sweden's fourth-largest city — the seat of the Church of Sweden (Uppsala Cathedral, Scandinavia's largest), the oldest university in the Nordic countries (Uppsala University, founded 1477), and the site of Gamla Uppsala (Old Uppsala), the most significant pre-Christian cult site in Scandinavia. The three great burial mounds of Gamla Uppsala (6th–7th century CE) were the centre of Norse religious life before Christianisation. Linnaeus (Carl von Linné, 1707–1778) created the modern system of biological taxonomy here.
Gamla Uppsala was the centre of the pagan Svea cult and Swedish royal power from at least the 4th century CE — the Anglo-Saxon historian Adam of Bremen (c. 1070) described a great golden temple at Uppsala with statues of Odin, Thor, and Freyr, surrounded by a sacred grove where sacrifices (blót) of humans and animals were hung from the trees every nine years. The three great burial mounds at Gamla Uppsala contain cremated remains from the 6th–7th century CE (Vendel period), their identities unknown but connected by medieval sagas to the legendary Yngling dynasty. Uppsala University (founded 1…