Gammelgarns kyrka

The church stands about 45 kilometres south-east of Visby and 4.4 kilometres south-west of Katthammarsvik. Its churchyard is enclosed by a dry stone wall with a broad Gothic lychgate to the west. Built of limestone, the church consists of a rectangular nave, a narrower chancel with a straight east end, a slightly narrower western porch, and a sacristy to the north, with a shingle-clad bell turret rising above the west end.

No trace remains of the earliest church on the site, though it is thought a small timber church stood here around the turn of the eleventh century, followed by a stone defence tower built nearby in the late twelfth century. Construction of a Romanesque stone church began in the early thirteenth century, starting with a short nave and chancel, before building continued in an early Gothic style. In the second quarter of the fourteenth century, a larger new church was built in High Gothic style, incorporating parts of the earlier structure, including the west porch.

The south portal is richly carved with biblical scenes from the early chapters of Genesis, including Adam and Eve, the expulsion from Eden and Cain's murder of Abel, attributed to a sculptor active on Gotland in the early fourteenth century sometimes referred to by the nickname "Egypticus". Two carved heads from the earlier Romanesque church sit above the portal. Inside, a slender central pillar supports four tall vaulted bays, and wide pointed arches connect the nave to the chancel and porch.

Among the church's furnishings are an altar cabinet from the mid-fourteenth century, a medieval font with a bowl added in the fourteenth century, and a late seventeenth-century pulpit attributed to the joiner Jochim Sterling of Visby. A runic gravestone set into the chancel floor commemorates a woman named Hallvi. On the nave's north wall, mid-fifteenth-century wall paintings by the so-called Passion Master were damaged by a later fire, though fragments were uncovered during restoration work in the twentieth century, alongside reconstructed decorative painting from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Beside the church stands a well-preserved defensive tower, or kastal, built of stone in the late twelfth century as a watch and refuge tower. Roughly ten by nine metres at its base and some thirteen metres tall, it is a rare surviving example of this type of Gotland fortification and has been renovated in stages, most recently in the mid-2000s.