Vä kyrka

The church was raised at royal initiative around the mid-1100s in Romanesque style, traditionally associated with the stonemason Regnerus. In the 1160s it was handed over to a Premonstratensian monastic foundation, which retained the church throughout the Middle Ages even after the community itself relocated to Bäckaskog in the 1200s. No trace of any monastic buildings survives, though they are thought to have stood south of the church.

The building has been altered over the centuries: a bell tower was added to the south in the 1300s and heightened in 1604, a northern extension (the 'new church') was built in the late 1500s, and the cross vaults and granite pillars date from the 1200s. In 1804 the upper sections of the two western towers were removed and the nave roof extended to the gable, giving the church much of its present external appearance.

Inside, the church is noted for a rich portal and interior decoration, including some of Sweden's most important Romanesque-period wall paintings, believed to date from the 1120s and attributed to an artist known as the Vä Master. Painted in a style showing Italo-Byzantine influence, they were uncovered during a restoration in 1963. The triumphal arch depicts the church's royal donors, King Niels of Denmark and Queen Margaret Fredkulla, the latter shown holding a model of the church, with the Virgin Mary above them; the barrel vault of the chancel shows angels, prophets and apostles bearing a scroll inscribed with a hymn of praise.

Other furnishings include a Renaissance-style pulpit from 1630, a Baroque altarpiece from 1674, and eighteenth-century pew ends decorated with biblical scenes by the painter Alexander Jungner. The present organ was built in 1967 by the Copenhagen firm of Poul-Gerhard Andersen, replacing several earlier instruments.

Vä itself once held town status, said to derive its name from an old word for a sacred place. The town's charter survived until 1614, when Christian IV ordered its burghers to relocate—retaining their rights—to the newly founded fortress town of Kristianstad, after Vä, an unfortified settlement, had repeatedly been attacked and burned by Swedish forces, most recently by Gustav II Adolf in 1612. With the townspeople went much of Vä's civic culture, notably its noted silversmithing; a gilded silver bridal crown made in 1597 by the silversmith Hans Klausen, said to be Sweden's oldest bridal crown with a known maker, remains linked to the neighbouring parish of Skepparslöv though now held on deposit at Kristianstad museum.

On the western edge of the former town stand the ruins of St Gertrude's chapel, probably built in the late 1400s and abandoned around the time of the Reformation; the ruin has since been restored and its west gable is a notable feature of the village skyline today. Vaulted cellars from the burghers' former properties also survive from the town period, with one restored example now used as a devotional room beneath the parish hall beside the church.