"Underrated Underground" Falun by Sjalen

Falun is surprisingly overlooked on VT for beeing a World Heritage, perfectly doable as an (admittedly long) daytrip from Stockholm. I once sold geraniums in the main square as an ex boyfriend's family had a garden centre nearby. Then I never had trime to see anything of the town itself as we were busy for a whole market day, so it was something I had wanted to do for a long time when I got to go here again during a Stockholm Christmas break. We chose Falun as a two day getaway on our own as winter has its limitations culture-wise in the Swedish countryside unless you are into sports and a town is then more open.

Falun turned out to be more quiet than I expected in the evenings, but then again, we went in between Christmas and New Year which is a calm period in between parties. I guess there is more going on when the students are back at college too. The municipality has 55000 inhabitants and you can tell that it is smaller than the neighbouring province's capital Gavle. Nevertheless, there is a great amount to see here as it is the capital of County Dalarna, especially if you visit it in summer as the countryside around Falun is full of really picturesque villages with folkloristic heritage log farms. I have visited some of them all those years ago, but unfortunately VT didn't exist then so pictures of that will have to wait until I go again to see more of them.

As for us, we had to make do with Falun itself this time since the weather gave lots of snow and meant buses were slow and photo opportunities dull. Not that we were disappointed since Falun houses a World Heritage copper mine which you can read more about below, and included in the World Heritage designation is also a huge part of the old wooden town centre beyond the ugly concrete shopping area of the 60s that marr so many Swedish medium sized towns.

For those who enjoy sports, and especially outdoors, Falun is a gem with Sweden's National Ski Stadium and the Wilderness forest trekking trail amongst the highlights. I think the only thing we were disappointed with in town was that we never found a restaurant serving the local falukorv, or "Falu sausage". Sure, it is more or less staple food all over Sweden for generations back but this is still where it comes from so we had expected more (even though we found a dedicated cook book). I guess we should have visited a more simple canteen style places for lunch than we did. This "national sausage" is otherwise one of the few nice sausages in Sweden. Not hard to see when you find out that it was first made by Germans working in the copper mine. They wanted to use all the meat on the thousands of oxens taken here and slaughtered to make durable hide ropes for the mine shafts. So like many other things, this ultra-Swedish thing is not Swedish at all (and these days made more with pork). But it is nice to know that the oxens they used came from my old family province of Småland so it started off in a nice way :)))

• Pros:scenic countryside, heritage mine
• Cons:boring town centre core
• In a nutshell:Fantastic cultural heritage area