After a sleepless transatlantic flight, I wasn’t about to head for bed following my arrival in Stockholm.

Tired and groggy — it would have been 4 a.m. back home in the States — I nevertheless looked forward to my tour of Stockholm’s City Hall with guide Carin Christensen.

Stockholm is built on 14 islands at the point where the Baltic Sea and Lake Malaren, Sweden’s third largest lake, meet. It’s not surprising, then, that when touring many of Stockholm’s major attractions, you’re never far away from water.

With its location at the tip of Kungsholmen, one of Stockholm’s major islands, City Hall is no exception. Built in what Christensen calls a “National Romantic style, the building looks like something out of the Middle Ages but was actually constructed out of roughly 8 million red bricks between 1911 and 1923.

Guided, hour-long tours of this wonderful building are offered in English several times a day and are the only way to gain admittance to the massive Blue Room, where around 1,300 Nobel Prize winners and their guests are feted every Dec. 10 after the awards ceremony. The tour also includes the lofty City Council Chambers (the ceilings here are truly amazing works of craftsmanship), the intimate Tapestry Room and the spectacular Golden Room, glimmering with gold leaf and intricate glass mosaics. For those with the stamina, the top of City Hall’s 106-meter-tall tower offers a splendid view of the surroundings.

A short walk away, Gamla Stan (Old Town) and adjacent Ridderholmen, constitute northern Europe’s largest and best-preserved medieval city. Built on two islands that gave birth to the city in the 13th century, the area is full of quaint medieval alleyways and cobbled streets lined with boutiques, restaurants and museums and the spacious Stortorget, a square lined with old merchants houses.

The area’s biggest draw is the Baroque Royal Palace where the changing of the guard takes place in regal fashion around noon daily. Completed in 1754, the Royal Palace is the official residence of the Swedish king, and public tours allow admittance to the royal apartments, the Hall of State, the Royal Armory and the palace vault, where royal crowns, keys and swords are on display in the underbelly of the colossal building.

Nearby, St. Nicolaus Church, the oldest church in Gamla Stan, is noted for its wooden statue of St. George and the Dragon, which dates back to 1489. Also referred to as Stockholm Cathedral, the church has seen the coronation of a number of Swedish kings, the last being Oscar II in 1873.

For a taste of modernity in Old Town, the Nobel Museum pays tribute to the 792 winners of the Nobel Prize since the awards were first handed out in 1901. The annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and economics are presented in Stockholm, while the peace prize is awarded in Oslo.

The museum, which examines the ideas and works of some of the world’s most creative minds through short films, computers and original artifacts (I spotted Marie Curie’s balance and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s typewriter in a display case), is located on the first floor of an ornate building at 2 Stortorget. The top floor is reserved for members of the academy who select the actual prizewinners.

For the curious, an actual medal, made with $3,000 worth of gold, is on display along with a series of changing exhibits, such as the collection of paintings by Winston Churchill I discovered during my visit.

I ended my day by taking a ferry over to the Vasa Museum, first passing by Grona Lund, the city’s historic 124-year-old amusement park, which boasts Europe’s highest free fall.

The Vasa holds the incredible story of a wonderfully preserved 1628 warship that sunk in the harbor on its maiden voyage. In the 1950s, researchers began looking for the immense ancient ship whose stern measured 60-feet tall. After locating it, a museum was built around the sea craft, reconstructed with 95 percent of its original material. Tours include a look at the crews’ quarters, the captain’s cabin and preserved relics.