Skokloster Castle is located on Lake Mälaren between Stockholm and Uppsala. It was built in the Baroque style between 1654 and 1676 by Carl Gustaf Wrangel after a design by Nicodemus Tessin the Elder. When Wrangel died in 1676, the castle passed into the hands of the Brahe family, and then, after 1930, became the property of the von Essens. In 1967 the castle and its contents were sold by the family to the Swedish government; since then it has been open as a museum. The castle is a remarkable monument to the Swedish Age of Greatness, a period in the middle decades of the seventeenth century when Sweden became one of the most powerful countries in Europe.
