Sweden's Pantry on Display: Inside Öland Harvest Festival
- janna225
- 24 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Article by: Sara Kay | Photography by Alexander Hall, Öland Skördefest, and Sara Kay | Published September 18, 2025
“There’s very positive feelings around Öland. It’s a little bit exotic.”
Thomas Isaakson, chairman of the board for Öland’s annual harvest festival, the Skördefest, has lived on the island for 45 years. He remembers when the first harvest festival started in 1997, after Sven Ekberg, a TV and radio personality from Öland, visited a spring harvest festival on the island of Jersey and wanted to bring a similar concept back to his homeland. He knows there are over 300 villages on the 137-kilometer (87-mile) long, 16-kilometer (10-mile) wide island, each one with its own character and specialty. While the festival celebrates the fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy, and fish of the summer’s labor, lovingly referred to as “Sweden’s pantry,” it’s also a celebration of the beautiful art that comes from here. He’s an artist himself.
“We have a lot of artists on the island,” says Thomas. “It’s the light. It’s very special.”
While the festival itself doesn’t take place until the last week of September (week 39), the end of summer is a sort of on ramp towards it. Restaurants and bars are already starting to advertise the types of events they’ll be hosting over the four day festival. Shops have copies of the yearly Skördefest magazine at the entrance, hoping people will pick up a copy to take home and flip through in preparation.
Over the four day event, the pantry doors really do swing open, with many farm shops and gardens welcoming visitors to come buy local produce. Restaurants across Öland also encourage visitors to partake in local dishes like kroppkakor (a potato dumpling filled with pork) and lufsa, (a pork and potato pancake). Artists, drawn by Öland’s famous light, cluster in the island’s southern reaches, filling galleries and exhibits with local creations. For families, the nearly 900 events include plenty of kid-friendly options, reinforcing the role of family in community life.
Since the first Öland Skördefest took place in 1997, much has changed. Today, the festival is owned by Friends of the Harvest Festival, a non-profit organization, and is managed by Pia Axelsson, operations manager for Ölands Skördefest AB, and her team, which as an organization works tirelessly to bring the event to life each year. That inaugural festival nearly 30 years ago had about 50,000 attendees. Now, they’re accustomed to 250,000 people coming and going over the four days. It used to be that after the summer harvest, Öland kind of shut down. Businesses, restaurants, and cafes closed their doors during the winter, making Oland a sleepy place to be until the warmer weather came back. These days, Öland Skördefest is the reason Öland is a year-round destination. What once started as a simple celebration of the summer’s harvest has blossomed into Sweden’s largest and most impressive harvest festival.
“50 percent of all the houses on Öland are summer houses,” notes Thomas. “It used to be that these people would go back to their homes in Stockholm or Gothenburg or Malmö in the first week of August, but now they stay until the harvest festival.”
The festival kickoff, like the celebration itself, is always special and always different. Each year, the opening event takes place in the previous year’s designated ‘Öland Village of the Year.’ For 2025, that honor belongs to Sandvik, a small harbor village on the island’s northeast coast, known for its historic castle.
“Before 1870, Sandvik was nothing, just an empty piece of coast more or less,” said Per Thege. Thege has been coming to Sandvik every summer and has family that comes from Öland, making it feel like a second home. He’s also co-authored two books about the village, with a third one on the way.
In addition to getting to enjoy all the local wares of Sandvik, visitors who come to enjoy the inaugural festivities at this year’s Skördefest will also get to see who wins the annual Golden Pumpkin award. This coveted honor — a literal golden pumpkin — goes to someone doing something great in food. Most recently, the award was given to a chef from Öland who was almost exclusively using local ingredients from the island at his restaurant.
“That prize can be for a person who grows the food, or cooks the food. It can be for someone who makes jam out of the food. But ultimately, it goes to someone who loves Öland,” says Pia.
The people who grow the food make up a big part of the pride that locals have for their island. Öland has about 50 farmers dedicated solely to its bean crop, and Skördefest gives visitors the chance to explore farm shops across the island selling potatoes, onions, pumpkins, and more—alongside meat and dairy from cows famous for their rich, distinctive flavor. “It’s not every day you come across a cow chewing on grass from a world heritage site,” notes Pia. On Öland, that’s just life.
Elisabeth Magnevall, co-owner of Öland Örtagard and Ekberg & Forsberg, a farm shop on southern Öland, has been exhibiting at the harvest festival since the beginning. For her and her business, the festival is crucial, not only because it keeps her in business year-round, but because of the good memories that people take away from the festival every year. “It is hard to set words on the feeling, but you see pumpkins and lights along every road. It feels warm even though the wind might be cold. Everybody is happy, and there are people everywhere.”
Skördefest is more than a showcase of local food; it’s a celebration of community. For an island that hosts a large vacation population each summer, the festival honors those who call Öland home year-round. It’s a gathering that strengthens identity, showcases local creativity, and offers an authentic taste of the island’s culture. It’s the reason Öland can show such pride in its local offerings, not being intimidated by the larger cities just across the bridge. It’s the reason that every year, Pia and Thomas and their team continue to add new and different activities each year to keep the festival interesting and engaging, and keep people coming back.
“You can’t find anything else like this festival in other places,” says Pia. “There are smaller harvest festivals around Sweden, but it’s nowhere near where we are. The people of Öland are very good at doing this after almost 30 years. They love the harvest festival. We are very welcoming here, and the people of the island are giving their best every year.”
