Lund is a city in the southern Swedish province of Scania, across the Öresund strait from Copenhagen. The town had 91,940 inhabitants out of a municipal total of 121,510 as of 2018. It is the seat of Lund Municipality, Skåne County. The Öresund Region, which includes Lund, is home to more than 4,1 million people.
Archeologists date the foundation of Lund to around 990, when Scania was part of Denmark. From 1103 it was the seat of the Catholic Metropolitan Archdiocese of Lund, and the towering Lund Cathedral, built circa 1090–1145, still stands at the centre of the town. Denmark ceded the city to Sweden in the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658, and its status as part of Sweden was formalised in 1720.
Lund University, established in 1666, is one of Scandinavia’s oldest and largest institutions for education and research. The university and its buildings dominate much of the centre of the city, and have led to Lund becoming a regional centre for high tech industry.
Parks and nature
Lund’s most central park is Lundagård, which, along with the adjoining University square, forms the centre of the University. The park is dominated by historic buildings including Lund Cathedral, Lund University Main Building, and Kungshuset. The trees of the park are home to a large colony of rooks.
The much larger main city park (Stadsparken) is located in the south-west corner of the city center. The site was used for the Lund Exhibition in 1907 and subsequently developed into a public park between 1909 and 1911. The park contains planted gardens, a small lake, a children’s playground and bandstands, as well as the public swimming center Högevallsbadet and the former buildings of Lund Observatory. It also has a menagerie that houses different varieties of birds.
Other significant areas of greenery in the city include the Botanical Garden (Botaniska trädgården) and Sankt Hans Hill in the north of the city. The nature preserve Rinnebäck Gorge (Rinnebäcksravinen), The Källby dams (Källby dammar) and the community park Folkparken are located in the western part of the city. The nature preserve Nöbbelövs Marshland (Nöbbelövs mosse) is located in the northwest of the city.
Popular places for swimming close to the city are the beaches in neighboring Lomma, Bjärred and Malmö and lakes such as the nature preserve Billebjer and the Dalby quarry (Dalby stenbrott) in the eastern countryside of the city.
Education
Lund University main buildingOne of the buildings of Katedralskolan, Lund Cathedral school.
Lund University
The university dominates much of the centre of Lund. It was founded in 1666 following the transfer of Scania to Sweden under the Treaty of Roskilde and is the second-oldest university in Sweden after Uppsala University. Its traditional centre is in Lundagård park but stretches out towards the north east of the city where the large engineering faculty is located. Today, Lund University is one of northern Europe’s largest, with eight faculties, 41,000 students and over 2,000 separate courses. It is ranked in the world top 100 universities and is a member of the League of European Research Universities as well as the global Universitas 21 network.
Other educational institutions
Katedralskolan, the cathedral school, founded in 1085, is the oldest school in Scandinavia. Today it is a high gymnasium with about 1,400 students studying in five different programmes.
The Royal Swedish Physiographic Society is a learned society based in Lund.
Culture
The culture in Lund is characterised by the university education and research, and the large student population and student traditions, such as a student theatre group since 1886. A substantial part of the student night-life is located at student fraternities called ‘Nations’.
Lund Cathedral, the former Catholic and the now Lutheran cathedral in Lund, is the seat of the bishop of Lund of the Church of Sweden. Lund also has a city theatre (though without a professional local ensemble of its own) and a number of other places for concerts and theatres.
Literature, theatre and cinema
Numerous prominent figures from the literary world lived and worked in Lund, often in association with the university and theatre. Prominent examples include Esias Tegnér, writer, poet and bishop, and August Strindberg, playwright, novelist and poet. A longer list is given below with other notable natives. The Lund novel is a genre in its own right, a bildungsroman in which a young student experiences life in Lund, Copenhagen and sometimes Österlen whilst maturing as an individual. The Lund novel is exemplified by the work of Fritiof Nilsson Piraten and Frank Heller.
The spex are a form of student theatre particular to Nordic universities, with a strong tradition in Lund. They are parodistic musical plays, often setting well-known music to new lyrics and mixing up the historical and the present in unconventional intrigues. Comedians Hans Alfredson and Anders Jansson started their careers in the Lund spex.
The concluding scenes in Ingmar Bergman’s classic film Wild Strawberries are set in Lund.
The Lund International Architecture Film Festival is held annually in the autumn.
Museums
The Bosmåla cottage is part of the open-air museum Kulturen, which hosts a collection of historical Scanian buildings.
Lund hosts the largest open-air museum of Scania, Kulturen. Kulturen is the second oldest dedicated open-air museum in the world. Founded in 1892 by Georg Karlin, it consists of more than 30 buildings, as well as collections exhibiting Scanian art, crafts, local archaeology and history.
Several museums are attached to the university. The Lund University Historical Museum is based in the Lundagård park. Its exhibitions were updated in 2018 and cover the history, archeology and zoology of Scania. There is a separate Lund Cathedral museum. The Museum of Sketches for Public Art is a unique museum that documents the development of public artworks. The Vattenhallen Science Center, connected to the university’s engineering faculty, has an interactive presentation of science and research.
Lundakarnevalen
The Lund carnival has been held every four years since the mid-nineteenth century: traditional accounts say it originated at a wedding in 1849 (the four-year intervals place the party in 2002, 2006, 2010, etc.). Arranged by the students of the university, from the 1950s onwards the event has grown in size and intensity (with some 5,500 volunteers 2010), but it remains an amateur event. Midway between a music and stage fair, a city festival, and an outpouring of satire, parody and general madness. Some students dress up in costumes, often relating to and poking fun at current issues, and parade in wagons. Others perform humorous skits in the evenings. The carnival revues and other stage entertainments have launched a number of well-known entertainers and actors over the years.
Economy
Lund is a regional centre for high tech companies, several of which are based in the north-east of the city. Companies with offices in Lund include Sony Mobile Communications, Ericsson, Arm Holdings, and Microsoft. The Swedish telecommunications company Doro has its head office in Lund. Gambro, one of the key companies in the development of the artificial kidney, was founded in Lund in 1964 and retains a significant presence in the city. Alfa Laval, the international manufacturer of heat exchangers and separators, have a factory in Lund, and Tetra Pak have their headquarters and part of production in town. Other important industries include pharmaceuticals, biotechnology e.g. Active Biotech, and publishing and library services.
Skåne University Hospital and Lund University are major employers, with extensive research facilities. In particular, the Lund Institute of Technology has connections with the high tech industry in the city. A science park, Ideon Science Park, was founded in 1983 as a collaboration between Lund University, Lund Municipality and Wihlborgs Fastigheter AB.[63] As of 2016 it hosts about 350 companies, employing 2,700 people. Many of these are high tech companies that have ties to the university.
The 2010s have seen the development of two major research facilities in Lund, both in collaboration with the university. MAX IV is the world’s most powerful synchrotron light source and a Swedish national facility. It was inaugurated on 21 June 2016. The European Spallation Source (ESS) is a pulsed neutron source under construction on a site just north of MAX IV. ESS is expected to directly employ about 450 people when it is completed in around 2023.
Tetra Pak was founded in Lund in 1951 by Ruben Rausing. Their principal product is packages and equipment for aseptic packaging of food, principally using plastic-coated cardboard. As of January 2015 Tetra Pak employed around 3,500 staff at their headquarters in Lund.
The pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca used to have a large presence in Lund but their offices closed in 2010. The site was re-developed as a research park named Medicon Village. As of 2016 over 1,200 people worked in more than 100 organisations based at Medicon Village.
