Tanums Kommun

The coast in particular, with its impressive, sometimes steeply sloping barren rock massifs, combined with one of the most beautiful sections of the Bohuslän archipelago, which consists of mostly bare islands, is the special scenic charm within Tanums Kommun. The contrast between the inhospitable landscape and the picturesque fishing villages such as Fjällbacka, Grebbestad or Hamburgsund, which crowd into the limited space between the rocks and the sea shore, gives the region an incomparable charm.

The inland of the municipality of Tanum

Only a few kilometres further inland the landscape changes its face and turns from a barren rocky landscape into a very fertile plain, which is interrupted again and again by single rocky elevations. These rocky hills not only look like islands in a green sea of fields and meadows, but before the beginning of the land uplift after the last ice age, they were real islands and the fertile soils of the fields were the sea bed.

Further east, the landscape in Tanums Kommun changes once again and is dominated by dense forests, lakes and mountains. This is where most of the approximately 150 lakes in Tanums Kommun are located, including the 17 square kilometre Bullaresjön lake system, the largest lake in the municipality.

On the eastern side of Bullaren, and thus on the eastern border of the municipality, the densely forested Kynnefjäll plateau begins with the highest point within the municipality, the 207-metre-high mountain Farlighögen. The Kynnefjäll is sparsely populated and has a high incidence of deer and elk. The numerous watercourses are home to beavers, and wolves and lynxes are occasionally seen.

Tanums Kommun in figures

With an area of 2,350 square kilometres, Tanums Kommun is one of the larger municipalities in Västra Götalands Län – the largest in the historical landscape of Bohuslän. With about 14 inhabitants per square kilometre, Tanums Kommun is much less densely populated than the Swedish average. About half of the total of 13,000 inhabitants within the municipality is concentrated in the central village Tanumshede and the seaside resort of Grebbestad with about 2,000 inhabitants each, and with about 1,000 inhabitants each in the two fishing villages and tourist hotspots Fjällbacka and Hamburgsund.