Sweden's relationship with painted walls is more complicated than its reputation for design suggests. Stockholm ran an explicit zero-tolerance policy on graffiti from 2007 to 2014, and the effect of those years — a generation of writers who worked around a ban rather than inside a commission — still shapes what the scene values.

Gothenburg went the other way. The city on the Göta älv, Sweden's port and its second city, kept legal walls through that period and became the centre of gravity for Swedish wall painting. It is a working harbour town with a shipyard past, and the art sits in that fabric rather than on top of it.

The other half of the story is small and coastal. Towns along the Baltic, Oskarshamn among them, have used mural festivals the way small towns everywhere now do — to give people a reason to come in summer, and to put something on the gable ends of streets that were emptying. The work is often better than the budget suggests, because the festivals bring in muralists from across Europe.

The country is long. Gothenburg to the far north is further than Gothenburg to Rome, and the train, not the car, is how most people cover it.