🇩🇰 Denmark · Zealand and the east
Copenhagen is one of those capitals you fall in love with at first sight and that get better with every day you spend there. It is the city of Scandinavian design, of bikes that rule over cars, of hygge (that Danish art of cosy living) and of a food scene that revolutionised world cooking from the Noma restaurant. Wedged between canals, harbours and parks, it is elegant and relaxed at the same time, royal and countercultural, orderly and full of life. Strolling along the Nyhavn quay, with its little coloured houses reflected in the water and its moored sailing boats, is one of the happiest postcards in Europe.
But Copenhagen is much more than its postcard. It is the capital of a small country that was a great Viking and colonial power, seat of the oldest monarchy in Europe, birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen and of Kierkegaard's philosophy. It is a city that reinvented itself as a world reference for sustainability, with the goal of becoming carbon neutral, canals so clean that people swim in the middle of the city, and neighbourhoods like Christiania, the free commune that defies every rule. It all coexists within a few blocks: the royal palace and the hippie commune, the oldest amusement park in the world and cutting-edge architecture.
This guide runs through the essentials of Copenhagen in a practical, friendly way: what to see, how to get around on its flawless public transport or on two wheels like a local, how to make the most of the harbour and the canals, where to sleep and eat without going broke (which in Denmark is a real challenge), and how to use it as a base for seeing Zealand. Copenhagen is the best starting point for falling in love with Denmark: a capital on a human scale, green, cultured and happy, which regularly appears among the best cities in the world to live in.
Copenhagen was born around the 11th-12th century as a modest fishing village called Havn ('harbour'), which Bishop Absalon fortified in 1167 —the date considered the city's founding— by building a castle on the islet of Slotsholmen to protect the entrance to the Baltic. Hence its name, København ('merchants' harbour'). It grew as a strategic trading post against the powerful Hanseatic League, and in 1443 it became the capital of the kingdom of Denmark. Its golden age came under King Christian IV (1588-1648), a great builder who gave it many of its most emblematic buildings, such as the Stock Exchange (Børsen), the Rundetårn tower and the Nyboder district. The city suffered plagues, devastating fires (1728 and 1795) and two brutal British bombardments during the Napoleonic wars (1801 and 1807), the latter with the theft of the entire Danish fleet. In the 19th century, with the walls already torn down, the Danish cultural 'Golden Age' flourished, with Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard. Occupied by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1945, Copenhagen is famous for the rescue of almost all its Jews, evacuated by boat to neutral Sweden in 1943. In the post-war years it became the modern capital of the Scandinavian welfare state, and in recent decades it has reinvented itself as a green and design capital. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The island of Zealand and the eastern islands hold a thousand years of Danish power: the capital, Copenhagen, the old Viking capital of Roskilde with its royal pantheon, the castles of Kronborg and Frederiksborg and the chalk cliffs of Møn.
Read the history of Zealand and the east →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it was the gleaming capital we know, Copenhagen was barely a handful of fishermen's houses on the shore of the Øresund strait. The first settlements in the area go back to the 11th century, when the place was known simply as Havn, 'the harbour'. Its position was unbeatable: a sheltered natural anchorage on the sea route linking the Baltic with the North Sea, facing the rich herring shoals that would be a gold mine for the kingdom for centuries.
The date tradition fixes as the founding of the city is 1167, when King Valdemar I handed the village to Bishop Absalon of Roskilde, one of the most powerful figures in medieval Denmark. Absalon, a warrior and statesman as well as a cleric, ordered a fortress built on the small islet of Slotsholmen to protect the harbour from the attacks of the Wendish pirates who ravaged the Baltic coasts. That castle was the seed of the city, and today Christiansborg Palace, seat of the Danish Parliament, stands on that same islet; beneath it the ruins of Absalon's castle survive and can be visited.
Under the shelter of the fortress, the small fishing port quickly prospered as a trading post. The name evolved into Køpmannæhafn, 'the merchants' harbour', which would give the modern København. By the early 13th century it was already a booming market town, with its marketplace, its church and a growing population living from trade and the herring fishery.
Copenhagen's prosperity brought it trouble. Its control over the Øresund passage and its lucrative herring trade made it an object of desire, above all for the powerful Hanseatic League, the confederation of German trading cities that dominated Baltic commerce. Through the 13th and 14th centuries, the city was attacked and sacked several times by the Hanseatics, who saw it as dangerous competition. Bishops, kings and nobles also fought over control of it.
Despite the sieges, fires and raids, Copenhagen never stopped growing. In 1254 it received its first municipal charter (town privileges), and through the 15th century its political importance shot up. The decisive moment came in 1417, when King Eric of Pomerania took possession of the castle and made it his residence, taking it from the bishops for good. In 1443, Copenhagen was officially proclaimed capital of the kingdom of Denmark, displacing the old royal seat of Roskilde.
As capital of a monarchy that in those years led the Kalmar Union —which brought Denmark, Norway and Sweden under a single crown— Copenhagen entered a new dimension. In 1479 the University of Copenhagen was founded, the oldest in Denmark and one of the oldest in northern Europe, which turned the city into a centre of learning. The medieval city, walled and dense, with its Gothic churches and narrow streets, was beginning to take the shape of a true capital.
If there is one name carved into the stone of Copenhagen, it is Christian IV, who reigned between 1588 and 1648, one of the longest-lived and most active monarchs in Danish history. Although his wars against Sweden ended in military disasters that cost the kingdom territory and money, his passion for architecture and town planning transformed the capital for good and gave it much of its present face.
Under his reign some of the city's most emblematic buildings went up: the Renaissance castle of Rosenborg, his pleasure residence; the Rundetårn (Round Tower), the observatory with its famous spiral ramp; the Stock Exchange (Børsen), with its unmistakable tower of four dragons with intertwined tails; the Nyboder district, with its yellow houses for the navy's sailors; and the arsenal and the fortifications. Christian IV expanded the city's perimeter, reclaimed land from the sea and laid out new districts such as Christianshavn, inspired by the Dutch canal cities.
The following centuries, however, brought catastrophes. The plague of 1711 killed a third of the population. Two devastating fires, in 1728 and in 1795, wiped out enormous portions of the wooden medieval city, so much of the old town we see today in fact dates from the reconstruction that followed, with more regular buildings in a classical style. Every disaster forced a rebuild, and the city kept shedding its skin without losing its layout.
The start of the 19th century was traumatic. During the Napoleonic wars, Denmark tried to maintain an armed neutrality that set it against Great Britain, the great naval power of the day. In 1801, the British fleet attacked Copenhagen in the battle of the fjord (where Admiral Nelson, according to legend, put the telescope to his blind eye so as not to see the order to withdraw). But the worst came in 1807: the Royal Navy bombarded the city for three nights to stop its fleet falling into Napoleon's hands. It was one of the first deliberate bombardments of a civilian population in modern history; whole districts burned, along with the cathedral and hundreds of houses, and hundreds of civilians died. The British took away the entire Danish fleet.
As a result, Denmark ended up on the losing side of the Napoleonic wars and, under the Treaty of Kiel of 1814, lost Norway, which passed to Sweden. The country was left impoverished and diminished, and in 1813 the state declared bankruptcy. And yet, paradoxically, out of those hard decades came the so-called 'Golden Age' of Danish culture (Guldalderen). In a small, battered Copenhagen an extraordinary generation flourished: the storyteller Hans Christian Andersen ('The Little Mermaid', 'The Ugly Duckling', 'The Snow Queen'), the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (father of existentialism), the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted (who discovered electromagnetism) and a whole school of painters.
In the middle of the century, Denmark also took a historic step: in 1849 it adopted a Constitution that put an end to absolute monarchy and established a constitutional monarchy with a parliament. In 1857 the old walls that were suffocating the city were pulled down, letting it at last expand beyond its medieval corset and create the great boulevards, parks and districts of modern Copenhagen.
On 9 April 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Denmark, which surrendered within hours in the face of an impossible defence. For the first years, the occupation was relatively 'soft' and the Danish government kept a degree of autonomy, but in 1943 the situation hardened: a state of emergency was declared and the Nazis prepared to deport Danish Jews to the extermination camps.
Then came one of the brightest episodes of the whole Second World War. Warned of the imminent round-up of October 1943, the resistance and thousands of ordinary Danes organised in a matter of days the clandestine evacuation of almost the entire Jewish population of the country —more than 7,000 people— on fishing boats that crossed the Øresund strait by night to neutral Sweden. Thanks to that popular mobilisation, more than 95% of Danish Jews survived the Holocaust, a case that is almost unique in occupied Europe. The Danish resistance also carried out numerous acts of sabotage until the liberation in May 1945.
The post-war years turned Copenhagen into the capital of a modern welfare state, prosperous and equal, a model of the social democratic 'Nordic model'. In 1971 the free commune of Christiania was born in some abandoned barracks, a symbol of the counterculture. In the year 2000 the spectacular Øresund bridge opened, linking the city with Swedish Malmö by road and rail and integrating the cross-border region. In recent decades, Copenhagen has reinvented itself as one of the greenest and most liveable capitals on the planet: it bet on the bicycle until it became the most cycling city in the world, cleaned the waters of its harbour until you could swim in the city centre, and set itself the goal of being one of the first carbon-neutral capitals. Today it is a byword for design, sustainability, cutting-edge food and that quality of life the whole world envies.