The bronze figure
A woman looking out to sea atop a 49-metre column.
Rolf Broberg (Rolf B) — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Virtual-Pano — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Virtual-Pano — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Andrzej Otrębski — CC BY-SA 4.0
The **Masthugget** and **Stigberget** districts west of the centre, among the best of the city and the least crowded. The route: from **Masthugg Church** with its red tower and its view, down to the **Seamen's Tower** and the **Maritime Museum**, then **Haga** — Gothenburg's oldest quarter, of timber houses, cafés and bakeries known for their enormous cinnamon buns — then up by lift or steps to the round seventeenth-century **Skansen Kronan** fortress and its view over the city. The whole route is about three kilometres and walks in two hours.
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The Seamen's Tower is a stone column forty-nine metres high in front of the Maritime Museum, topped by a bronze figure of a woman looking out to sea — Gothenburg's monument to the sailors who did not return. It was unveiled in 1933 after a public subscription, by the sculptor **Ivar Johnsson** and the architect **Nils Olsson**. The figure is known as **Woman by the Sea**, and that is what makes the monument different: it represents neither the sailor nor the ship but the one who waited — the wife and mother who stood watching, and nobody came. That reversal of viewpoint is deliberate, and it is what made the monument closer to the city's people than a heroic one would have been. Gothenburg lost a great many men at sea across centuries of shipping and fishing, and some of their names are on the column's base. It stands on the highest point in the area, with a view over the harbour and the river mouth. **Free and always open**, and combined with the Maritime Museum directly below it.
A woman looking out to sea atop a 49-metre column.
The harbour and river mouth from the area's highest point.
In front of the Maritime Museum, Gothenburg