Surrounded by the Baltic Sea, about 60 miles off the southeastern coast of Sweden’s mainland, Gotland is the largest of the country’s bucolic islands (which number well over 200,000), and one that has a seemingly split personality. In the short summer season — primarily July and August, when temperatures hover in the balmy 70s — revelers descend on this mostly wild, windswept and sparsely populated province for all-night partying and the rambunctious weeklong electronic music festival Stockholmsveckan. Outside of high season, though — and anywhere outside of its largest town, Visby (population: 24,300) — Gotland remains a rural paradise, popular with outdoorsy Stockholm professionals looking to escape city life by hiking along the island’s craggy limestone cliffs and cycling past tiny clapboard fishing villages, crumbling medieval churches and 18th-century farmhouses. Several Stockholm-based architects have even chosen to build their own startlingly contemporary houses on the tradition-bound island.

Lately, Gotland has been attracting a growing stream of international visitors, too. Chalk it up to gloomy political and environmental forecasts if you will, but as travelers increasingly seek out pristine landscapes offering peace and quiet, the island presents the perfect retreat — just a 40-minute flight from Stockholm. Design-forward boutique hotels offer access to nature that doesn’t require pitching a tent in the wilderness, and a clutch of remarkably good restaurants — serving fresh-caught Baltic fish and all manner of organic locally grown vegetables — show off the bounty of the surrounding farmland. Throw in a few charming craft-oriented Nordic design shops and an impressively large collection of museums for an island with a population of just 60,000, and you have a compelling reason to skip the mainland entirely.