Falsterbo – a Seaside Resort with a Long History

Wide‑stretching beaches and crystal‑clear waters.
Children laughing and splashing, sun‑warmed skin and a light breeze bringing relief. It’s summer break. It’s the 2020s in Falsterbo — a seaside town on Skåne’s south coast, shaped by over a century of bathing culture.

One can imagine what it was like back then, in the early days of cold‑water bathing culture: women with white sun parasols and gentlemen in straw hats strolling along the coast. The couples seem to glow, having enjoyed a pleasant day with several health‑giving dips in the sea at the newly built bathhouses — women and men separately, as the customs of the time prescribed.

Christian Kindblad, chairman of the Näset cultural association Calluna, who has kindly shared photographs and postcards from the period, explains:

“Cold‑water bathing culture began to establish itself in Sweden around the 1890s. But at that time, few people beyond the local residents of Falsterbo had the opportunity to enjoy its beaches. Transport connections were limited, and the comfort that lay at the heart of bathing culture had yet to be developed.”

With the opening of Strandhotellet in 1896, cold‑water bathers began travelling to the resort in earnest. But it was not until the railway between Vellinge and Näset was completed in 1904, and the luxurious sea‑bathing establishment Falsterbohus opened in 1908, that the foundations were laid for a flourishing future. When Falsterbohus was rebuilt a few years later into a high‑end hotel complex, the scene was set.

Bathing huts – a defining feature

Families wanted to bathe together. Respectable women and men did not undress in public. The solution came in the form of portable tents, where changing into bathing costumes could be done discreetly. Over time, the tents evolved into simple bathing huts, and later into the distinctive bathing huts that still line the beaches of the Falsterbo Peninsula today.

When the Strandbaden facilities were built in the late 1920s, bathing became accessible even to those without private huts. Beneath the restaurant, visitors could change on the beach — and this was also the site of one of the shoreline’s great attractions: a wooden waterslide more than ten metres high.

“For ten öre, you were given a board to ride on, and then you simply hurled yourself down and surfed straight out into the sea. If there was no attendant in the booth, clumps of seaweed were used as a ‘mat’ down the slide. Perhaps even more spectacular was the iron ring you could hire at Falsterbohus — something you strapped yourself into before wheeling out into the water,” says Christian Kindblad.

A century of bathers has left its mark

In the decades that followed, a steady flow of prominent members of the bourgeoisie from near and far would gather at Falsterbohus. With the later years of the interwar period — followed by the expansion of public access to nature — the foundations were laid for the seaside resort as we know it today.

“Summer houses began to appear, and later, in the 1950s, many people gained the financial means for leisure and holidays more generally. People invested in cars, and it became an obvious choice to drive to the Peninsula for sun and sea,” says Christian Kindblad.

For more than a century, bathers have been drawn to Falsterbo by its white sand, shallow beaches and inviting waters. Falsterbohus has long since been converted into residential apartments, but its significance to the town’s development can still be clearly traced in Falsterbo’s neighbourhoods.

Falsterbo has evolved from a small fishing community into a town with a distinct village centre, where many early‑20th‑century houses have been preserved and carefully restored. The old cold‑water bathhouses, meanwhile, have been replaced by the Skanör Falsterbo Cold Bathhouse (Kallbadet) in Skanör harbour.