Stockholm Metro Art Guide: The Best Stations on the Blue and Red Lines

Often called the world's longest art exhibition, the 110-kilometre Stockholm Metro (Tunnelbana) features sculptures, mosaics, reliefs and full-cavern paintings inside more than 90 of its 100 stations. When engineers blasted the deeper Red Line and Blue Line tunnels through solid ancient granite bedrock in the 1970s, artists persuaded the transit authority to leave the rough-hewn rock walls sprayed with raw shotcrete rather than covering them in flat tiles, turning the platforms into dramatic subterranean caves. Best of all, you can tour the entire system on a single 75-minute SL tap-in ticket as long as you stay inside the ticket barriers.

The 90-minute Self-Guided Route (6 Essential Bedrock Caves)

Start at the lower Blue Line platforms of T-Centralen and split your loop between the Blue Line (Lines 10 and 11) and the Red Line (Lines 13 and 14):

1. T-Centralen (Blue Line 10/11 platform, bottom level): do not stop at the upper tiled Green/Red platforms; ride the long escalator all the way down to the bottom Blue Line cavern, where artist Per Olof Ultvedt painted soothing Prussian-blue vines, flowers and silhouettes of construction workers across the whitewashed rock arches in 1975.
2. Kungsträdgården (Blue Line 10/11, one stop east of T-Centralen): an underground archaeological fantasy garden by Ulrik Samuelson incorporating red, green and white baroque colour schemes, trickling bedrock water, moss and replicas of marble statues that once stood in the 17th-century Makalös Palace directly overhead.
3. Rådhuset (Blue Line 10/11, one stop west of T-Centralen): sculpted by Sigrid Fridman in warm terracotta-pink shotcrete to feel like a natural sandstone grotto, complete with a giant stone boot hanging upside down from the ceiling and an industrial chimney base.
4. Solna Centrum (Blue Line 11 toward Akalla, 9 minutes from T-Centralen): the most photographed cavern on the network, painted by Karl-Olov Björk and Anders Åberg in fiery blood-red sky above a deep emerald spruce forest depicting 1970s rural depopulation and environmental protection.
5. Stadion (Red Line 14 toward Mörby centrum, two stops from T-Centralen): Enno Hallek and Åke Pallarp's joyful bright sky-blue cavern spanned by a giant wooden rainbow celebrating the nearby 1912 Stockholm Olympic Stadium.
6. Tekniska högskolan (Red Line 14, one stop past Stadion): Lennart Mörk's tribute to science and the elements beside the Royal Institute of Technology, featuring suspended geometric polyhedrons, Newton's apple, Copernicus's solar system and Leonardo da Vinci's flying wings.