Shark Attacks in Sweden

Why 3,200 kilometres of Swedish coast have produced one entry in 270 years

Sweden's coastline is really two different seas. The long eastern and southern shores, from the Gulf of Bothnia down through the Stockholm archipelago, Gotland, Öland and Skåne, face the Baltic, a semi-enclosed basin fed by rivers and cut off from the Atlantic by the shallow Danish straits. Its surface water is only a fifth to a quarter as salty as the open ocean, and in the far north it is nearly fresh. Sharks are marine animals whose body chemistry is tuned to full-strength seawater; with the exception of a stray spiny dogfish drifting into the western Baltic, they simply do not live there. Tens of millions of summer swims happen on those Baltic beaches every year, and not one of them has ever met a shark.

The other sea is the west coast: the Öresund off Malmö and Helsingborg, the Kattegat along Halland, and the Skagerrak along Bohuslän from Gothenburg to the Norwegian border. Here the water is Atlantic in origin and, in the deep Koster trench off Strömstad, reaches oceanic salinity at depths of 200 metres and more. This is where Sweden's sharks live, and it is where the country's one record sits. But the species list is small and mostly harmless: dogfish, catsharks and lanternsharks in the deep water, an occasional porbeagle or tope offshore, a basking shark in a warm summer, a Greenland shark hauled up by a trawler. The animals with the size, teeth and coastal habits to injure a person are absent, and the water is cold enough that even the boldest swimmers spend minutes rather than hours in it.

Put those two facts together and the empty file makes sense. The one entry the database does hold comes from Bohuslän in 1755, the Skagerrak coast where sharks are most plausible, and it is so sparsely documented that it cannot be called a bite with any confidence. Since then, through the growth of sea bathing in the nineteenth century, the boom in leisure boating in the twentieth and the arrival of cold-water surfing and kayaking in the twenty-first, nothing has been added.

Bohuslän in 1755, and the Swedish coasts with no record at all

A single entry makes no map, so the list below places the one recorded location alongside the stretches of Swedish coast where people are in the water most, none of which has ever produced an incident.

• Bohuslän, Skagerrak (the recorded case)The only Swedish location in the database, dated 1755. The entry names the province and the sea and nothing more: no town, no activity, no injury and no shark. It is the earliest and the only Swedish row, and it belongs to an era when what counted as a shark encounter was recorded loosely.
• Kosterhavet and StrömstadSweden's first marine national park, opened in 2009 around the Koster islands, sits over the deepest and saltiest water on the coast. Velvet belly lanternsharks, dogfish and catsharks live in the trench, and divers and kayakers use the islands all summer. No incident is recorded.
• Gullmarsfjorden and LysekilThe country's only true threshold fjord and the base of its marine research stations, where the sharks of the west coast are studied. Sea-bathing culture on this coast goes back to the eighteenth century; the record is empty.
• The Gothenburg archipelagoThe busiest swimming and boating water in western Sweden, from Vrångö and Styrsö to Marstrand. Small sharks pass through the deeper channels; bathers have never met one.
• Halland and the Kattegat: Varberg, Falkenberg and HalmstadSweden's surfing coast, where Apelviken and Tylösand draw board riders and kite surfers on autumn winds. The Kattegat is shallower and less salty than the Skagerrak and holds even fewer sharks; nothing has ever been logged here.
• Öresund and the Skåne beachesMalmö's Ribersborg and the beaches around Helsingborg and Landskrona are among the most-used in the country. The strait is the doorway between the North Sea and the Baltic, and the occasional dogfish that slips through it is the only shark ever seen.
• The Stockholm archipelago, Gotland and the Gulf of BothniaThe entire Baltic coast. Water too fresh for sharks, thousands of islands, and the greatest concentration of summer swimmers in Sweden. There is no entry and there is no realistic prospect of one.

The full Swedish record

The statistics and the table below are drawn directly from the SharkSider incident database, which combines the International Shark Attack File, the Global Shark Attack File and verified local reports and is updated every week. Sweden contributes one row, dated 1755. Because the decade chart covers only the years from 1900 onward and no Swedish entry falls in that period, the summary grid shows 1 recorded incident and 0 since 1900, and no chart is drawn.

• Recorded incidents1 (0 since 1900)
• Fatal0
• Years covered1755–1755
• Since 20000 incidents, 0 fatal
• Most common activityOther / not stated
• Most identified sharkRarely identified

The most recent incidents

• 1755 · Bohuslän, Skagerrak arm of the North SeaActivity not statedShark not identified · not fatal

Every recorded incident

How to read the single row. The place column gives Bohuslän and the Skagerrak arm of the North Sea; the activity, injury and shark columns are empty, so the builder prints them as not stated. The outcome shows survived because nothing in the entry indicates a death, not because a survival was documented; in truth the record does not say what happened to anyone. The since-2000 figure is zero, the last fatal entry reads none, and the most common activity is listed as other or not stated for the same reason. Beyond noting that the people involved were fishermen, the database holds no name, age, vessel or shark description for this case, and none has been added. The most accurate summary is that Sweden has one historical mention of a shark encounter and no confirmed shark attack.

Sweden's sharks, and why none of them is on the list

The record names no species, so this section describes the sharks that actually inhabit Swedish water and what each one means for a swimmer.

Spiny dogfish. The most numerous shark on the west coast and the only one that regularly strays into the Öresund and western Baltic. Rarely a metre long, it feeds on herring and small fish and has never been implicated in a bite on a person anywhere in Scandinavia. Swedish landings have been banned for more than a decade because the stock collapsed.

Small-spotted catshark. A slender bottom-dweller of the Skagerrak, familiar to divers at Kosterhavet and to anglers in Gullmarsfjorden. The small-spotted catshark has tiny teeth and no interest in anything larger than a crab; in neighbouring Norway it is the species behind the one modern entry, and even that was a provoked handling case with no injury.

Porbeagle. The largest predatory shark that visits Sweden. The porbeagle is a relative of the great white built for cold water, but it hunts mackerel and herring in open sea and is protected across European waters. There is no Swedish case attributed to it and no credible reason to expect one.

Basking shark. Seen off Bohuslän in warm summers, sometimes close to shore. The basking shark can exceed eight metres and filters plankton through its gaping mouth; it is harmless and, if anything, at risk from boat strikes rather than a risk to anyone.

Greenland shark and the deep-water species. The Greenland shark, the velvet belly lanternshark and other deep-living species occupy the Koster trench and the Norwegian Trench beyond it, far below any swimmer. They complete a fauna of about a dozen species that between them have never harmed a person in Sweden.

Absent species. The great white shark does not occur in the Skagerrak or the Baltic, and neither do tiger sharks nor bull sharks. Blue sharks and threshers appear rarely, far offshore. The full guide to sharks in Sweden covers every species with a Swedish record.

Swimming in Sweden: the real risks and the shark rule

An empty record produces no shark-specific rules, and the honest safety advice for Swedish water has little to do with sharks at all. Cold water shock, rip currents on the Halland surf beaches, boat traffic in the archipelagos and jellyfish blooms in late summer are the hazards that actually send people to hospital. Even so, a few points follow from the way sharks use the west coast.

• Deep water is where the sharks are. Dogfish, catsharks and lanternsharks live over the Koster and Gullmar trenches and along the Norwegian Trench; the beaches and shallow bays where people swim are not their habitat.
• Give a basking shark room. If you are in a kayak or on a board when one surfaces off Bohuslän, keep a boat length away and let it pass; the danger is a collision, not a bite.
• Anglers and divers handling a dogfish or catshark should mind the spines and the teeth. The only Scandinavian shark entry of the last century, Norway's 2007 case, was a diver handling a small catshark, not a swimmer bitten in the water.
• The Baltic needs no shark precautions. There is no shark population to take precautions against.

For completeness, our guide on how to survive a shark attack explains what to do when a large shark shows interest in a swimmer; in Sweden that situation is theoretical, but the advice on staying calm, keeping the animal in sight and leaving the water without splashing is sound anywhere.

Sweden against the Nordic and world record

The International Shark Attack File confirms in the region of 60 to 80 unprovoked shark bites a year worldwide, concentrated in the United States, Australia and a short list of tropical and subtropical coasts. Northern Europe barely registers. In the same SharkSider database, Norway, with a far longer Atlantic coast, has 2 entries between 1818 and 2007 and no death; Iceland has 2, the more recent from 1936; and Russia, whose entries come from the Pacific coast rather than the Baltic, has 4 with no fatality. Denmark, Finland, Germany and Poland, which share the Baltic with Sweden, have no incident record of their own on this site because there is nothing to record. Sweden's single row from 1755 places it exactly where its geography predicts: a country whose sea is either too fresh for sharks or too cold and too deep for the kinds that bite.

Neighbouring records around the North Sea and the Baltic

The nearest comparable pages are Norway on the far side of the Skagerrak, Iceland and Ireland on the Atlantic edge, and Russia at the eastern end of the Baltic. For the sharks themselves rather than the incidents, see sharks in Norway and sharks in Denmark, which share the Skagerrak and Kattegat fauna described above. The complete list of national records is on our shark attacks overview.

Written and reviewed by

SharkSider Editorial Team

A small team focused on researching sharks and making marine biology easy to understand. Every page is reviewed against current species records and the SharkSider attack database, and updated when new incidents or research appear.

Published August 28, 2023 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · 1 records for Sweden in the SharkSider attack database (0 fatal), updated weekly.