Founded in 1446, Gävle is officially Norrland’s oldest town, but not much of its original incarnation remains. A fire in 1869 wiped out most of the old wooden buildings that formed the town’s core. Today the little cluster that survived the fire is preserved in the rickety jumble that is Gamla Gefle, just south of the city centre. It’s fun to wander through and surprisingly easy to get lost in, considering its tiny size. One of the houses is now Joe Hill-gården, a museum marking the birthplace of the US labour-union organiser. Hill was wrongly convicted of a murder and executed in Utah in 1915. Some of his poetry forms part of the memorial here.
