Sala sockenkyrka

The church is generally dated to around 1300, and remarkably much of its original timber roof structure survives from that period, showing refined and technically accomplished carpentry for its time. The porch roof has been dated slightly later, to around 1316. A steeple that once topped the building was removed in 1715. During the 1460s the interior was given brick star vaults, and the porch a cross vault, setting the stage for one of the church's most striking features.

Soon after the vaulting was completed, the ceilings were painted by Albertus Pictor, the most celebrated church painter working in Sweden at the time. The scheme here is unusual, including depictions linked to the fifteen omens of the Last Judgement and scenes concerning Antichrist, along with a well-known image of St Michael fighting the dragon on a south wall pillar. The paintings were later limewashed over and only rediscovered and uncovered during a restoration in 1931.

An unusual carved wooden face projects from the roof eaves at the north-east corner of the chancel exterior, worked in pine and blackened with tar; tool marks are still visible. Its original purpose and meaning are not known, though similar sculpted features are thought to have existed elsewhere on the roofline.

Among the furnishings, a sandstone font dates from the 1200s and is attributed to a group of works associated with the Gotland-based mason Sigrafr. The altarpiece, made around 1520 in the Brussels workshop of Pasquier Borman (son of the renowned Jan Borman, who made the high altar retable at Strängnäs Cathedral), has its own turbulent history: removed from the church in the mid-1700s, it was poorly stored and damaged, spent a long period deposited with a local heritage society, and was only returned and restored to the church in 1931. A runic stone with finely interlaced decoration is built into a corner of the church, though sources differ slightly on whether this is the south-western or south-eastern corner. In the porch stands an unusual 16th-century memorial gravestone to a local couple.

The present organ was built by E A Setterquist & Son of Örebro and installed during rebuilding works in 1889–90, with a facade designed by architect Carl Fredrik Ekholm; it replaced an earlier instrument by Jonas Gren & Petter Stråhle from 1761. The freestanding bell tower in the north-eastern corner of the churchyard was built in 1926 to designs by Arre Essén, echoing an earlier 17th-century stapel that had fallen into disrepair and was demolished; for over a century afterwards the bells hung on low wooden trestles before the current tower was raised.