Leksands kyrka

The site has a long history: archaeological excavations found Christian burials here from as early as the eleventh century, and traces of an earlier square stone foundation, possibly a stave church, thought to date from the twelfth century. The oldest surviving parts of the present church are now generally dated to around 1300. A tall tower, the first of its kind in Dalarna, was added in the fifteenth century, and brick vaulting with paintings in the so-called Tierp school style followed around 1500.

The building's history has been repeatedly shaped by disaster and rebuilding. The medieval west tower collapsed in a storm in 1573 and was rebuilt, and a lightning strike and fire in 1627 destroyed the tower again, prompting the church bells to be moved to a freestanding bell tower outside the churchyard wall, completed in 1630. A further lightning strike in 1709 caused another serious fire, damaging the tower, roof and some fittings. It was after this that the church gained its distinctive onion dome, built between 1709 and 1715 over the centre of the roof, giving the building the character of a central church rather than one with a west tower. Tradition attributes the dome's design to returning prisoners of war inspired by Russian models, though it is generally considered to have been built in a typical Swedish Baroque style associated with architects such as Jean de la Vallée and Nicodemus Tessin the Elder.

Inside, the church retains the large galleries, known locally as dalmål skullar, once typical of churches in populous parishes, where the congregation was seated according to social groupings such as elderly men, elderly women, soldiers and unmarried young people. Because parishioners traditionally wore local folk costume, these divisions would once have been visually obvious.

Among the furnishings, a medieval triumphal crucifix in the chancel has been variously dated by different scholars to the fourteenth century, with most agreeing it is a Swedish work possibly made in the Mälardalen region. Other notable items associated with the church's history, including an altarpiece, a set of vestments and a gilded copper chalice base, were later transferred to neighbouring chapels such as Älvdalen, Djura and Evertsberg. The church contains work from later centuries too, including a pulpit reworked in the eighteenth century and a font by the same craftsman, Olof Gerdman.

The church has had several organs over the centuries, including an eighteenth-century instrument by Johan Niclas Cahman, later replaced, and a larger organ built in 1895 by E. A. Setterquist & Son, which has since been rebuilt and altered more than once, most recently in 2020–2021. A smaller chancel organ, installed in the 1980s, was built with its main division inspired by the historic Cahman organ.

The churchyard has been described by at least one twentieth-century writer as among the most beautiful in Sweden, and several notable Swedes, including the composer Hugo Alfvén, are buried there. A modern Way of the Cross made from stones of different Dalarna rock types leads from the churchyard.