Travel and Tourism in Denmark

Copenhagen: The City That Works

Odense: The City of the Storyteller

Odense, the third-largest city in Denmark and the capital of the island of Funen, is most famous as the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen. The city has spent two centuries wrestling productively with this fact — at times overwhelmed by the weight of the association, at other times finding in it a source of genuine cultural energy.

The Hans Christian Andersen Museum, reopened in 2021 after a major redesign by Kengo Kuma and Associates, is one of the most innovative museum experiences in Denmark. Rather than presenting a conventional chronological biography, the new museum immerses visitors in the world of the fairy tales themselves, with poetic, dreamlike installations that evoke the landscapes and moods of the stories. The museum building extends underground and into the street level of the old town in a way that physically embodies the concept of a world underneath the ordinary world — the fairy tale reality just beneath the surface of everyday Odense.

The old quarter of Odense, with its half-timbered houses and medieval street plan, retains considerable charm. The cathedral of Saint Canute, one of the finest Romanesque churches in Denmark, houses the remains of two Danish kings. The Brandts museum complex presents contemporary art and photography. Odense has made a considerable effort in recent years to define itself as a city of creativity and culture rather than simply as the place where Andersen happened to be born, and it is largely succeeding.

Aarhus: Denmark's Second City

Aarhus, on the eastern coast of Jutland roughly halfway between the German border and the northern tip of the peninsula, is Denmark's second-largest city with about 350,000 inhabitants. It is primarily a university city — Aarhus University is one of the largest in Scandinavia — and has a youthful, energetic culture that reflects its large student population.

The ARoS Art Museum, one of the most striking contemporary museum buildings in Denmark, opened in 2004 with a design by Schmidt Hammer Lassen that wraps a large cubic volume in a facade of dark brick. The museum's permanent collection spans five centuries of Danish and international art, but its most distinctive feature is the rainbow panorama, a circular walkway on the museum's roof enclosed in colored glass that filters the view of the city through the spectrum. Designed by the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson and added to the museum in 2011, the rainbow panorama has become one of the most photographed contemporary art works in Scandinavia.

Den Gamle By — The Old Town — is an open-air museum in the center of Aarhus that has been assembling historic Danish buildings from across the country since 1909. The collection now includes over 75 complete buildings from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, arranged as a functioning town with period-appropriate interiors and costumed guides. Unlike many open-air museums that feel static and academic, Den Gamle By has a genuine vitality, particularly in the twentieth-century sections that recreate Danish daily life from the 1920s, 1950s, and 1970s with extraordinary attention to period detail.

The Moesgaard Museum, south of the city, presents prehistoric and Viking archaeology in a building that is itself a work of architecture — a long sloping green roof descending to the landscape, designed by Henning Larsen Architects. The museum's collection includes some extraordinary prehistoric artifacts, including the Grauballe Man, another remarkably preserved Iron Age bog body whose face, like that of the Tollund Man, carries an eerie immediacy across millennia. The Viking halls contain extensive material from Danish excavations and present the Viking Age in its full complexity — not just warriors but farmers, traders, craftspeople, and explorers.

Bornholm: The Sunshine Island

Bornholm, lying in the southern Baltic some 200 kilometers east of Copenhagen and closer to Sweden and Poland than to the Danish mainland, has a character all its own. Its geology is different from the rest of Denmark — hard granite rather than soft limestone and chalk — giving it dramatic cliffs, forested hills, and a landscape more reminiscent of the Swedish west coast than the Danish plains. It gets more sunshine than any other part of Denmark, which has made it a popular domestic holiday destination.

Bornholm is famous for its smoked fish — the traditional smokehouse chimneys, called røgerier, appear throughout the island's coastal villages, producing smoked herring, salmon, and mackerel that are sold directly to visitors and shipped across the country. The island has also developed a strong ceramic tradition, with numerous working pottery studios open to visitors. The combination of craft food, craft ceramics, dramatic landscape, and medieval monuments makes Bornholm one of Denmark's most rewarding island destinations.

The round churches of Bornholm — there are four of them, built in the twelfth century as combination religious buildings and defensive towers — are unique in Scandinavia and architecturally extraordinary. The largest, Østerlars, stands in a farmland setting surrounded by its whitewashed exterior like a great stone drum, its interior dark and ancient. Hammershus, on the island's northwestern cliff, are the largest castle ruins in Scandinavia, a sprawling complex of towers and walls that date to the thirteenth century and offer views over the Baltic that explain immediately why this position was worth fortifying.

Denmark's UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Denmark's contribution to the UNESCO World Heritage list reflects the country's extraordinary historical depth and geographic spread. The kingdom and its territories claim 12 World Heritage Sites in total — three within Greenland, two in continental Denmark, and five either transnational or located in overseas territories.

The Jelling Mounds, Runic Stones and Church, inscribed in 1994, represent the most important heritage site in Denmark proper. Located in Jelling in Jutland, the complex marks the transition from Viking paganism to Christianity and the founding of the unified Danish state. The two large burial mounds, the runic stones of Gorm and Harald, and the medieval church built above an older wooden church all occupy a compact area in the small Jutland town, making it one of the most historically dense sites in Scandinavia.

Roskilde Cathedral, inscribed in 1995, is significant as the burial church of Danish royal dynasties since the tenth century and as an early example of Gothic architecture in Scandinavia. Its unbroken function as a royal mausoleum over more than a millennium makes it unusual even among the great ecclesiastical buildings of Europe.

Kronborg Castle, inscribed in 2000, represents the Renaissance fortress at its most dramatically sited and best preserved. Its significance is both architectural and cultural — as a symbol of Danish control of the Baltic trade and as the setting of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Stevns Klint, inscribed in 2014, preserves one of the world's most important geological records — the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary that marks the mass extinction event 66 million years ago.

The Wadden Sea, inscribed first in 2009 and extended in 2014, is shared between Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands and represents one of the world's most important tidal wetland ecosystems, critical for millions of migratory birds.

The Struve Geodetic Arc, a chain of survey triangulation points stretching from Norway to the Black Sea established in the nineteenth century to measure the exact shape and size of the earth, passes through Denmark and is shared with nine other countries.

The High Coast and Kvarken Archipelago, though primarily a Swedish site, involves Danish scientific history in its recognition of postglacial rebound — the ongoing rising of land as it recovers from the weight of the last ice sheet.

In Greenland, the Ilulissat Icefjord (inscribed 2004) is one of the most active glacial environments on earth and a site of extraordinary natural beauty. The Aasivissuit-Nipisat landscape (inscribed 2018) documents 4,000 years of Inuit summer hunting culture. Kujataa (inscribed 2017) preserves the Norse and Inuit farming landscapes of southern Greenland that represent the first European agriculture in the Americas.

Par Force Hunting Landscape in North Zealand, inscribed in 2015, is a cultural landscape in northern Zealand designed in the 17th century by King Christian V, inspired by French Baroque hunting traditions. Its distinctive geometric road network and forest corridors remain remarkably intact, representing the courtly hunting culture of the era.

Christiansfeld, a Moravian Church Settlement, inscribed in 2015, was founded in 1773 in southern Jutland and is one of Europe's best-preserved examples of Moravian Brethren urban planning. Its yellow brick buildings, identical street facades, congregation house, and God's Acre cemetery reflect a unique communal religious philosophy.

The Viking-Age Ring Fortresses, inscribed in 2023, are five extraordinary circular fortresses built by Harald Bluetooth around 980 AD: Aggersborg, the largest, Fyrkat, Nonnebakken, Trelleborg, and the recently discovered Borgring. Their geometrically precise design, with four symmetrical quadrants and identical longhouses, reveals a sophisticated level of Viking Age military engineering.

Møns Klint, inscribed in 2025 as Denmark's most recent UNESCO site, features the dramatic white chalk cliffs of the island of Møn rising up to 128 meters above the Baltic Sea. Formed from ancient seabed sediment, the cliffs expose fossils of sea creatures that lived 70 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period. The clifftop ancient beech forest Klinteskoven is among Denmark's most spectacular natural environments.

Harbor Life and Swimming in the City

One of the more unexpected pleasures of Copenhagen is swimming in the harbor. In most major European cities with historic industrial waterfronts, swimming in the harbor is either prohibited or inadvisable due to pollution levels. Copenhagen's harbor, which had been heavily polluted through much of the twentieth century by industrial discharge and combined sewer overflow, was cleaned up through an extraordinary twenty-year infrastructure investment program that separated storm drains from sewer systems and eliminated industrial discharge. By 2002, the water quality in the inner harbor was clean enough for swimming, and the city opened the first harbor bath — a floating outdoor swimming facility — at Islands Brygge.

The harbor baths are now one of the great institutions of Copenhagen summer life. On a warm July day, the Islands Brygge harbor bath fills with hundreds of bathers diving from platforms, floating in the sheltered lanes, or sunbathing on the wooden decks above the water. Children queue for the diving towers. Older Copenhageners do their methodical laps. The atmosphere combines the informality of a beach with the accessibility of a city park. Harbor swimming has become a symbol of what Copenhagen's environmental investment has achieved and, more broadly, of the quality of urban life that the city's policy choices have created.

Beyond the harbor baths, Copenhagen has constructed a series of outdoor kayaking and canoe routes through the city's canal system, water sports facilities at various harbor locations, and regular organized open-water swimming events. The relationship between the city and its water — once purely industrial, then polluted and inaccessible, now clean, recreational, and integrated into daily urban life — is one of the most instructive examples of urban environmental transformation in the world.

Greenland: The World's Largest Island

Greenland occupies a special place in any account of the Kingdom of Denmark — it is simultaneously one of the world's most remote and extreme environments and a territory of enormous strategic and environmental significance. The island's relationship with Denmark has been complex and sometimes troubled: colonized from the eighteenth century, made a formal part of Denmark in 1953, granted home rule in 1979, and achieving self-governance in 2009, Greenland moves steadily toward a full independence that many Greenlanders desire but that the territory's economic dependence on Danish block grants makes currently impractical.

The indigenous Greenlandic Inuit people, who call themselves Kalaallit and their land Kalaallit Nunaat, have inhabited the island for at least 4,500 years. Their traditional culture — seal hunting, dog sledding, kayaking, and a rich oral and musical tradition — has survived centuries of European contact, Christian missionary activity, and the pressures of modernity, though not without considerable damage. Greenlandic is the official language of Greenland alongside Danish, and there are active efforts to strengthen the language and culture in the face of ongoing assimilation pressures.

The town of Ilulissat, on Greenland's west coast, is the gateway to the Ilulissat Icefjord UNESCO site. The town's waterfront is lined with colorful houses against a backdrop of icebergs that dwarf the buildings below — some of the icebergs visible in the fjord stand fifty meters above the water surface, with most of their mass below. Boat trips into the fjord, past ice formations of extraordinary scale and beauty, are among the most dramatic natural experiences available to travelers anywhere in the world.

The Greenlandic capital of Nuuk, with about 18,000 inhabitants, has grown rapidly into a small but genuine city, with museums, restaurants, and cultural institutions reflecting both the Greenlandic heritage and the modern ambitions of the self-governing territory. The Greenland National Museum, which holds archaeological collections from throughout the island's history, is particularly important for its display of the Qilakitsoq mummies — eight naturally preserved human mummies dating from approximately 1475 AD, including a six-month-old infant, that represent one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in Arctic history.

Thor Heyerdahl, the Faroe Islands, and North Atlantic Exploration

The Faroe Islands, the archipelago of 18 islands in the North Atlantic that is the third component of the Kingdom of Denmark, has a history and culture that is in many ways more Norse than modern Denmark. Settled by Irish monks in the sixth century and then by Norse Vikings from around 800 AD, the Faroe Islands have maintained a language — Faroese — that is descended directly from Old Norse and is among the living languages most similar to the language of the Vikings.

Faroese culture is defined by the sea, the weather, and the traditions of a community that lived in extreme isolation for most of its history. The Grindadráp, the traditional Faroese pilot whale hunt that takes place annually when whales enter Faroese waters, is one of the most controversial of all Faroese traditions, drawing intense international criticism from animal rights organizations while being defended by Faroese people as a sustainable tradition that has fed their communities for generations.

The landscape of the Faroe Islands is among the most dramatic in the North Atlantic — vertical cliffs dropping into the sea, waterfalls tumbling from plateau edges, green valleys between dark volcanic ridges, and the constant presence of seabirds: puffins, fulmars, gannets, and kittiwakes in numbers that speak to the extraordinary richness of the surrounding ocean. The photographs that have made the Faroes famous internationally — particularly the images of tiny Faroese villages clinging to cliffsides above improbably blue water — do justice to a real landscape that exceeds expectation.