The Willow Hotel in Trelleborg, a small city east of Malmö, Sweden opened in June. Sitting at 16-storeys high, it’s the tallest building in town.Supplied
The Willow Hotel on the southern Swedish coast stands on the boundary of two worlds. From one side of the 16-storey building’s upper levels, you can see golden wheat fields and willow groves. From the other, the Baltic Sea stretches to the horizon, beyond a sprawling ferry port.
The Willow’s Noory Spa is full of amenities, including two outdoor pools and two saunas.Supplied
The Willow in Trelleborg, a small city south of Malmö, became the tallest building in town when it opened in June. The hotel’s offerings include two upper-league restaurants and a sports tavern, and the extensive Noory Spa, with two outdoor pools, two saunas and panoramic views from its bar area. The comfortable guest rooms are decorated in a subdued modern style that carries through the entire property. Extensive windows suffuse all levels of the building with light, making the most of long Scandinavian summer days.
I enjoyed its restaurants, especially the main-floor Meadow Brasserie where I dined on cheese puffs with goat cheese, rosemary and rhubarb, and an entree of sea bass velouté with mussels, asparagus and dill. The attentive server made an excellent wine pairing suggestion with a Spanish white. The same space offers a lavish breakfast buffet each morning, including many kinds of Swedish cheese, smoked fish and baked items.
The Willow had a strong first summer, but manager and part-owner Robin Lundgren admits the hotel’s priority is still “to create the demand.” To some extent, he’s counting on a cheap Swedish krona (relative to the euro and the Danish krone), and increasing reluctance by travellers to summer in southern Europe, after recent heat waves and wildfires. These “cool-cation” tourists could be ready for Trelleborg. About 1.45 million passengers already move through the town’s ferry terminal each year, many of them tourists from Germany, Poland and Lithuania.
The Willow is conveniently located in Trelleborg which is a half-hour train ride to Malmö, and one hour to Copenhagen.Supplied
Why you should visit
Trelleborg has been a marine crossroads for centuries, shipping items such as grain, tires and leather goods to other Scandinavian countries, the U.K. and elsewhere. A small museum tells a diverting tale of the town’s many incarnations, from Viking fortress (partially rebuilt near a Viking museum), to freewheeling trading post, to industrial and tourism hub.
It’s pleasant to wander the lanes between rows of typically Swedish one-storey houses with decorative brickwork and dormers cut into steep roofs, which are sometimes tiled in clay, or to stray near the historic St. Nikolai Church, with its stepped roofline and dramatic cemetery, full of embedded slabs of stone whose inscriptions have mostly worn away.
A disused water tower in the centre of town is both a local landmark and a bustling cafe. The small Trelleborg City Park nearby features a marshy duck pond and stands of chestnut, walnut and yew trees. There’s also a huge cast-bronze fountain, whose walls are formed from the undulating body of a serpent, the head of which rears above a mermaid sporting on the beast’s back.
The fountain is the work of Axel Ebbe (1868-1941), a native-son sculptor whose museum in Trelleborg reopened last winter after a major overhaul. Ebbe had a strong allegorical tendency and a fondness for nymphs, trolls and rustic grotesques. His museum is a must-see.
The hotel’s offerings include two upper-league restaurants, Tapacha! and the Meadow Brasserie.Supplied
Room for improvement
The two signature restaurants aim for very different themes – French at the brasserie, Spanish at the rooftop tapas bar, Tapacha! – but elements of their decor were identical. More differentiation would be good. Also, at Tapacha!, my server seemed startled when I asked for bread and olive oil for dipping, a standard item in Spanish restaurants, and then returned with charred bread and a thoroughly tasteless oil.
Since you’re in the neighbourhood
A free double-decker bus ride takes you from the City Park along the coast to Smygehuk, Sweden’s southernmost point, which features craft markets, places to sample aggakaka (a southern Swedish egg cake served with fried pork belly and lingonberries), and another nymph-like statue by Ebbe, modeled on actress Uma Thurman’s Swedish grandmother. The bus itself is also an attraction: It’s a real English Routemaster from the mid-1960s, the likes of which hasn’t been seen on London streets for decades.
If you want more urban adventures within easy reach, it’s a half-hour train ride from Trelleborg to Malmö, and one hour to Copenhagen, where I spent a long afternoon visiting the National Museum of Denmark and sampling Danish pastries before heading to the airport for my flight.
Rooms at the Willow Hotel start at about $210.Supplied
The take-away
Trelleborg is a pleasant place to visit for a day or two and a good jumping-off point for adventures along the Swedish coast and in the surrounding countryside. The Willow is, for now, the best and most ambitious hotel along the coast.
The Willow, WorldHotels in Trelleborg is about an hour’s drive or train ride from Copenhagen. Rooms start at about $210.
The writer was a guest of the hotel, which did not review or approve this article. Stories are based on merit; The Globe does not guarantee coverage.