Why a 400-year-old shipwreck is worth the ferry ride

King Gustav II Adolf commissioned Vasa as the mightiest warship in the Baltic — two full gun decks, elaborately carved and gilded, built to project Swedish naval power during the Thirty Years' War. She never got the chance to fire a shot in anger.

Top-heavy from the extra deck of cannon and too little ballast to compensate, she heeled over in the first real gust after leaving Stockholm on 10 August 1628, roughly 1,300 metres into her maiden voyage. Water poured through her open lower gunports, and she went down in full view of the crowds who'd gathered on the shore to watch her sail. About thirty of the roughly 150 people aboard died.

The cold, low-oxygen, low-salinity water of the Baltic is inhospitable to the shipworm that destroys wood elsewhere — which is why, when engineer Anders Franzén located the wreck in 1956 and salvage teams raised her intact in 1961, most of her original hull and thousands of artefacts came up with her.

She's since been resin-treated, reassembled, and rehoused in a purpose-built museum on the old naval shipyard where she was constructed. The building itself is designed around her: a copper roof rises into stylised masts at the height the real ones would have stood, and inside, she's visible from six levels, keel to sterncastle. The museum opened to the public on 15 June 1990 and has been seen by more than 45 million visitors since.