Emmaboda Kommun

The landscape within the Emmaboda Kommun is predominantly flat. It consists mainly of forest, to be precise, almost 80 percent of the municipality is forested, which is by the way very sparsely populated compared to the rest of southern Sweden. Only five percent of the municipality's territory is used for agriculture.

Similarly it behaves with the lakes. Although there are about 130 lakes in Emmaboda Kommun, they only cover about four percent of the area and are usually rather small. The largest exception is the lake Törn between the central town Emmaboda and the next larger town Vissefjärda. With an area of about eight square kilometers, the lake Törn is by far the largest lake within the municipality and, due to its strikingly irregular shape, has a surrounding shoreline of almost 44 kilometers in length.

Attractions in the Emmaboda Kommun

Although part of the glass empire, there are no longer any active glassworks in the municipality of Emmaboda, with the exception of a small artistic glassblowing workshop. The last large glassworks in the municipality, the Boda Glasbruk in the village of the same name, stopped production in 2003. The buildings of the glassworks have been preserved, however, and since 2011 are home to the museum The Glass Factory with the largest glass collection in Sweden as well as exhibitions and events including demonstrations of glass production.

With four local and open-air museums as well as other small museums, Emmaboda Kommun offers for a small municipality an above-average number of opportunities to immerse themselves in the cultural history of the region. Visitors often encounter the period of emigration, when around 1.2 million Swedes left their homeland to flee poverty between 1850 and 1930.

A topic that affected large parts of Småland, but one that is especially remembered in Emmaboda Kommun. The author Vilhelm Morberg (1898 – 1973), who set a monument to the Swedish emigrants with his well-known work The Emigrants, was born in the municipality and also had the actions of his epic played in the area. The film adaptation of the work also remained faithful to the area and used the open-air museum Klasatorpet, which shows a typical torp from the time of the emigrant movement, as a filming location.

Emmaboda Kommun in figures

With an area of about 718 square kilometers, Emmaboda Kommun is the second smallest municipality in the province of Kalmar Län. With only about 9,500 inhabitants and a population density of not quite 14 inhabitants per square kilometer, the municipality is well below the province's average of 22 inhabitants per square kilometer. More than half of the inhabitants, about 5,000 people, live in the urban area of the central town Emmaboda – in Vissefjärda, the next largest town in the municipality, there are living just under 700 people.