Lindholmen Castle

About

Lindholmen Castle (Swedish: Borgen Lindholmen) was a medieval castle on the former island of Lindholmen, which is now part of the larger island of Hisingen and lies within the urban area of modern Gothenburg. The castle stood on a rocky outcrop, which is still known as Slottsberget ("The Castle Hill"), overlooking the Göta Älv. This was an area of immense strategic significance in the Middle Ages, as at that time Hisingen straddled the Norwegian-Swedish border, and the mouth of the Göta Älv was Sweden's sole point of access to the North Sea.

The fortress is attested for the first time in 1333, when King Magnus IV Eriksson of Sweden marked one of his letters as having been written in castro nostro Lindholm ('in our castle Lindholm'), and it appears again in a letter from 1334, this time spelt Lyndholmis. It is sometimes claimed that the castle had previously been mentioned in Sturla Þórðarson's Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar, as the saga refers at one point to a location við Lindhólmana ('by the Linden-Isles'), but Sturla never actually states that there was a castle or indeed other any sort of settlement in the area. Nor is any castle at Lindholmen mentioned in a 1315 document by which Dukes...