Stortorget is the name of the scenic large square in the centre of Gamla Stan, which is surrounded by old merchants' houses including the Stockholm Stock Exchange Building.

The square was the site of the Stockholm Bloodbath, where Swedish noblemen were massacred by the Danish King Christian II in November, 1520.

A statue of St. George and the Dragon (sculpted by Bernt Notke) can be found in the Stockholm Cathedral, while Riddarholmskyrkan is the royal burial church.

Bollhustäppan, a small courtyard at Slottsbacken behind the Finnish Church, just south of the main approach to the Royal Palace, is home to one of the smallest statues in Sweden, a little boy in wrought iron.

While the archaeology of the 370 properties in Gamla stan remains poorly documented, recent inventories done by volunteers have shown many buildings previously dated to the 17th and 18th centuries, can be up to 300 years older.

The young woman, however, tricked him to arrange a celebration including prominent guests which eventually turned into a boozing party, and, while Agne slept in a drunken stupor, Skjalf had him hanged in his gold necklace before escaping.

The eastern wall passed between two defensive towers; the northern being that of what was to become the castle Three Crowns, destroyed by fire in 1697, and the southern, of which no archaeological traces have been found, is known to have been given to the Blackfriars by King Magnus Eriksson (1316–1377) in 1336 and therefore was arguably located at the location for the monastery, in the southern end of Prästgatan, north of the square Järntorget.

While Stockholm is likely to have expanded quickly, it remains much debated if the expansion was planned in accordance to the model of southern prototypes (e.g. such as Lübeck) and, as historical sources traditionally have rendered it, governed directly by Birger Jarl (1210–1266) and Magnus Ladulås (1240–1290), or, as some historian have argued, a somewhat desultory if not entirely unmethodical process.

Located where is today Järntorget ("The Iron Square"), this marketplace was at the time not much more than two landing stages separated by an open space on the southern corner of the island.

Within the city, the artery roads were stipulated to be eight ell wide (aln, e.g. barely five meters) to allow horse-drawn vehicles to pass, while no rules restricted the width of cross-streets.

Many public notices were in vain devoted to restrain the habit of littering the surrounding waters and restricting the number of animals kept within the city walls, and not until the end of the Middle Ages were gutters ordered to be cleaned twice a week and the placement of bogs forbidden next to neighbours and thoroughfares.

Latrines were gathered on central locations known as flugmöten ("fly meetings") where the number of insects darkened the sky well into the 19th century.

[5] The present alleys only give a vague glimpse of the appearance of the medieval city where the gables of the building were facing the streets and contained window bays for offering goods of sale; where filth, the bumpy paving and hand-drawn vehicles made walking circumstantial; and where odours and scents from dung, food, fishes, leather, furnaces, and seasonal spices mingled.

During nights (and certainly during the long winters) the city was completely dark, save for exceptional fire watchers and nocturnal ramblers who used torches to find their bearing.

[8] A map of Stadsholmen dated 1626 presents a proposal for two streets roughly equivalent to the southern stretches of today's Tyska Brinken and Stora Nygatan.

The informal northern end of Stora Nygatan was thus connected to the newly created square Mynttorget by Myntgatan, and the slope Storkyrkobrinken was widened.

To what extent these two projects were planned and initiated by the King Gustavus II Adolphus himself remains undocumented, but undoubtedly he must have played an important role.