SkogstrolletThe free map for exploring Sweden’s outdoors.

Västra Götaland County

National parks and nature reserves in Västra Götaland County

Västra Götaland County has 543 nature reserves and 4 national parks. Between Skagerrak, Lake Vänern and the forests along the Norwegian border, exceptionally rich marine habitats meet extensive conifer country.

From salt water to an inland sea

Västra Götaland crosses several sharply different natural regions. Bare granite, archipelagos and shallow inlets line the Bohuslän coast beside Skagerrak. Farther south the shore turns towards Kattegat, while plains, fracture valleys and connected lakes lead inland. Lake Vänern forms an inland sea to the east. Between these waters, wooded uplands follow gneiss ridges broken by mires and narrow lakes.

The contrast continues below sea level. Kosterhavet combines sunlit shallows with the Koster Trench, which descends to 247 metres. Currents deliver cold, salty and oxygen-rich Atlantic water. About six thousand marine species occur in the national park, nearly three hundred of them unknown elsewhere in Sweden.

A hidden landscape below the waves

Eelgrass meadows and seaweed forests occupy the shallows, while steep submarine slopes fall towards dark seabeds. At a depth of 85 metres, cold-water coral forms a living reef. This is no tropical seascape: it is evidence that some of the county’s most distinctive nature remains invisible from land.

The islands also reveal immense spans of geological time. Koster gneiss is around 1.6 billion years old and is crossed by hundreds of dark dolerite dykes. Younger Bohus granite dominates the mainland to the east. Ice, waves and post-glacial land uplift later carved and redistributed these rocks into today’s smooth slabs, shingle and shore meadows.

Three national parks in the forest interior

Inland, the scale changes again. Tiveden National Park, shared with Örebro County, occupies a grid of fractures that began forming about a billion years ago. The ice sheet left boulders up to ten metres high among lakes, swamp woodland and old fire-influenced pine forest. More than 770 beetle species have been recorded.

Farther west, Tresticklan protects the largest roadless and uninhabited forest tract in this part of Sweden. Narrow ridges of 1.65-billion-year-old gneiss create washboard terrain, with elongated lakes and mires between lean pine woods. Djurö provides a final contrast in Lake Vänern: only 315 of its 2,400 hectares are land. Wooded islands, bare skerries and traces of a lighthouse and small fields recall the few families who once lived there. Together, the four national parks lead from deep sea and granite coast to fractured forest and a freshwater archipelago.

National park in the county

Kosterhavet is Sweden’s first marine national park, ranging from eelgrass meadows to the 247-metre Koster Trench. About six thousand marine species live here, nearly three hundred occur nowhere else in Sweden, and cold-water coral builds reefs 85 metres below the surface.

Strömstad and Tanum
View the national park on the map

Selected areas in Västra Götaland County

Kosterhavet, Tiveden, Tresticklan and Djurö represent deep sea, boulder-filled fracture forest, roadless wilderness and Lake Vänern’s archipelago.

Map of selected areas in Västra Götaland County