Västerbotten County

Björnlandet National Park and nature reserves in Västerbotten County

Västerbotten County has 466 nature reserves and one national park. High mountains and broad uplands descend through forest and mire country to a coast that is still emerging from the Bothnian Bay.

Three landscapes connected by water

Västerbotten crosses three broad natural regions. The mountain chain in the west contains high massifs, upland lakes and fast streams. Farther east, conifer forest, mires and rounded hills dominate an interior cut by rivers flowing towards the Bothnian coast. More than 17,000 lakes larger than one hectare add to this water network. Near the sea the land becomes lower, meeting shallow bays, sandy islands and an archipelago continually altered by land uplift.

Vindelfjällen gathers almost the full range of Swedish mountain habitats within one protected landscape. At 564,918 hectares it is the country’s largest nature reserve, encompassing heath, lakes, wetlands, mountain forest and unregulated water. It is also a Sámi cultural landscape, where long-established reindeer grazing remains part of the ecological process that maintains open ground.

Fire in the forest, movement in the river

Wildfire has repeatedly renewed the inland forest. Björnlandet preserves old pines bearing scars from past fires, together with spruce, deciduous-rich stands, mires and younger woodland. Its terrain is striking: cliffs rise above boulder depressions and giant blocks, some arranged into cave-like spaces by glacial action.

Rivers create change on a different timescale. The Vindelälven is one of Sweden’s four national rivers and remains free from hydropower development. At Vindel-Storforsen it branches across dark volcanic rock. Stones removed during the timber-floating period have been returned, restoring the irregular currents and riverbed structure needed by aquatic insects, fish and specialised plants along the shore.

Four thousand years above the sea

Bjuröklubb emerged from the Bothnian Bay about four thousand years ago. Wind-shaped pine and spruce now grow among wave-smoothed bedrock, shingle fields and large dunes. The coast is still rising, shifting the shoreline seaward and leaving former beaches stranded on dry land while new shallow-water habitats form below them.

The headland also concentrates migration. On favourable spring days, hundreds of thousands of small birds can pass, joined by raptors, cranes, swans and geese. Björnlandet, Vindelfjällen, Vindel-Storforsen and Bjuröklubb therefore form one connected account of Västerbotten: snow and water travel from mountain to sea, while fire, ice and post-glacial uplift determine the character of forest, river and coast.

National park in the county