The spring sun shines over Mariefred's pride

Mariefred is a cosy little summer town that is obviously great to visit even in the low season. Winding little streets lined with old wooden houses. The area also has a large number of castles, mansions and other unique buildings. Perhaps the most famous is the so-called Vasaborgen, which for a time was a royal prison. At first Erik XIV put his younger brother Johan III there, but then he was released, rebelled and suddenly the older brother was in prison. Add to that a poisoned pea soup and we have an excellent recipe for a royal soap. And so it goes. The power struggle continued and a third brother became king, Charles IX. It was he who saw the potential of the castle and rebuilt it into what we call today Gripsholm Castle.

When the castle began to be renovated, the village revived and became something of a trading centre, and in 1605 the area received its town privileges. 1609 was the year when the town's burghers got tired of accommodating travellers for free and instead relegated the travellers to the newly built inn. The building is located just down by the water with a beautiful view of the castle. The inn is Sweden's oldest but fortunately for us it seemed to be fairly newly renovated.

The facility is part of the Swedish Cultural Pearls which is a small hotel chain with small, cosy hotels that all have both good food and good service. Read more about our visit to Dufweholm Manor, which is also part of the chain.

In the pictures you can see our room, which boasted a fireplace, a tiled stove, a large lovely bathtub and really comfortable beds from Hästens. The bedroom had perhaps a little too many wooden details for our taste, but we still appreciated that they created a unique character in the room.

They have two restaurants at the facility, Bakfickan Skänken, a slightly simpler bistro and Matsalen á la carte, which serves everything from individual dishes to entire tasting menus. When we got there, they also offered "Afternoon Tea in a new costume" which was very nice. It was an unusually well-prepared buffet filled with cuts, scones, sandwich cakes, cold cuts, cakes, pies, desserts, etc. We discussed how different it can be when the hotel includes some kind of afternoon tea in the package. In some places it is at most coffee and cake, but in this case they had gone all in and offered one of the better afternoon tea we have been to.

Once we had recovered from our coffee, it was time for the tasting menu. They had unfortunately missed that we had ordered a special diet but the excellent staff quickly caught on and after conferring with the chef, they presented a new excellent menu. We think this is the hallmark of good service, sometimes things go wrong but the big question is how you choose to solve it so that the guest is still satisfied. In this case, they solved it in an excellent way.

Everything was fantastic but we still felt that it would have been enough with two slightly smaller desserts rather than the full-sized ones that were now served. In addition to the good food, one of the wines was extra memorable, Chateau du Moulin Noir from 2011. It was really amazingly good and unusually advanced for a wine package.

So what did we think of the experience? Lovely weather, picturesque town, cosy hotel and good food. Nothing to complain about except possibly that there was nothing that stood out. We realised that maybe it's just a matter of having had three similar experiences in a row and if this had been the first, we would probably have given it a higher rating.

I guess you can only write such a comment if you're terribly spoilt... 🙂 )