🇩🇰 Denmark · Zealand and the east
Frederiksborg is, for many, the most beautiful castle in Denmark, and they have a point. Built on three islets in the middle of a lake, with its towers, its copper roofs and its red-brick facades reflected in the water, it looks like something out of a fairy tale. It was commissioned at the start of the 17th century by King Christian IV, the great builder of the Danish monarchy, and it is the crowning work of the Dutch Renaissance in northern Europe. Walking around it through its baroque gardens, with their geometric parterres and their fountains, gives you one of the most stately scenes the country offers.
But Frederiksborg is not only a postcard: it is also the great reliquary of Danish national memory. Since 1878 it has housed the Museum of National History of Denmark, created and funded by the founder of the Carlsberg brewery, J.C. Jacobsen, after a fire that almost destroyed the castle. Going through its more than seventy rooms is a journey through five centuries of Danish history by way of portraits of kings, battle paintings, furniture, tapestries and objects, in sumptuous interiors that culminate in the magnificent royal chapel, where monarchs were crowned and anointed for centuries.
This guide shows you how to make the most of Frederiksborg on a trip from Copenhagen: what to see inside the castle and in its gardens, how to get to Hillerød on the S-tog train, how to get around, and how to combine it with Kronborg or the Louisiana museum. Between the beauty of the palace on the water, the richness of its museum and the elegance of its baroque gardens, Frederiksborg is one of the essential visits in northern Zealand.
Frederiksborg Castle takes its name from King Frederik II, who bought the estate in the 16th century, but its present form was given to it by his son, King Christian IV (1577-1648), who was born here and rebuilt it completely between 1600 and 1620 as the grandest royal palace in Scandinavia, on three islets in the middle of the Hillerød lake. Christian IV, a monarch who loved architecture, conceived it as a symbol of the power of the Danish crown at the height of the Dutch Renaissance, with its royal chapel, its towers and its halls. For centuries, Frederiksborg was a royal residence and, above all, the place where the kings of Denmark were crowned and anointed in its chapel. In 1859, a devastating fire destroyed much of the castle. Reconstruction was made possible by a national subscription and, very particularly, by the fortune of the brewer J.C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg, who funded the restoration of the interiors. Jacobsen also drove the creation, in 1878, of the Museum of National History of Denmark inside the castle, with the idea that it should be a 'Danish Versailles' preserving the country's memory through historical portraiture. That museum, still owned by the Carlsberg Foundation, is today the castle's main attraction. 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 became one of the most dazzling palaces in Europe, the place where Frederiksborg now stands was a manor estate called Hillerødsholm, set on some islets in the middle of a lake in northern Zealand, in a landscape of woods and water. The property belonged to the noble Gøye family, until in the mid-16th century it passed into the hands of the Danish crown.
It was King Frederik II, who reigned between 1559 and 1588, who acquired the estate around 1560, drawn by its good hunting grounds and its setting on the lake. The monarch enlarged and remodelled the existing buildings and renamed the place after himself: 'Frederiksborg', Frederik's castle. Frederik II was also the king who rebuilt Kronborg castle in Helsingør, so in their first form the two great castles of northern Zealand are both down to him.
That first Frederiksborg was already a notable royal residence, but not yet the monumental palace we know. Its true splendour would come with the next generation, with the son of Frederik II, a boy born in this very castle in 1577 who would become the greatest builder in all of Danish history: Christian IV. The future king's childhood passed among these walls and these waters, and perhaps that is where the special affection he would feel for the place came from.
When Christian IV came to the throne, he decided to transform the castle where he had been born into the grandest royal residence in all of Scandinavia, a symbol of the power and ambition of the Danish monarchy at its height. Between 1600 and 1620, the king ordered much of the earlier building demolished and a spectacular new palace raised in its place in the Dutch Renaissance style, then the latest architectural fashion in northern Europe.
The new Frederiksborg was built on three islets in the lake, joined by bridges, which gave it both scenic beauty and the air of an impregnable fortress surrounded by water. Christian IV spared no expense: red-brick facades with rich sandstone detailing, copper-topped towers, ornamented gables, galleries, monumental courtyards and a royal chapel of dazzling opulence. He brought in the best craftsmen and artists from Flanders and northern Germany, and filled the palace with works of art, tapestries and sumptuous furniture.
The castle became the setting for court life and, above all, the place where the kings of Denmark were anointed and crowned, a solemn function the royal chapel performed for almost two centuries, from 1671 to 1840, at the coronations of the absolute monarchs. Frederiksborg was the symbolic heart of the monarchy.
Christian IV, as well as a tireless builder (the Stock Exchange, the Rundetårn and much of the face of Copenhagen are also down to him), died in 1648 after a long reign marked by his passion for architecture and by disastrous wars against Sweden. Frederiksborg remained one of his great legacies, the jewel of the Nordic Renaissance.
Through the 17th and 18th centuries, Frederiksborg enjoyed its period of greatest institutional prominence. After absolute monarchy was established in Denmark in 1660-1665, the castle's royal chapel became the place where the absolute kings were anointed in a ceremony loaded with symbolism. The chapel also came to display the coats of arms of the knights of the Danish royal orders, the Order of the Elephant and the Order of the Dannebrog, a tradition that continues to this day and turns its walls into a living heraldic gallery of Danish history.
In the first third of the 18th century, King Frederik IV commissioned great baroque gardens facing the castle, on the other side of the lake. Designed around 1720 in the style of the French gardens of Versailles, they were laid out in descending terraces with parterres of clipped box in geometric patterns —including the monograms of the Danish kings— water cascades along the central axis and symmetrical avenues. It was the expression of the baroque taste for mastering and ordering nature, and it multiplied the majesty of the palace.
Over time, and as royal residences went in and out of favour, Frederiksborg lost some of its everyday use as a court, although it remained a dynastic symbol of the first order. The baroque gardens, very expensive to maintain, came to be neglected and were partly reworked to the romantic and English taste of the 19th century, with lakes and more natural groves, before being restored to their original baroque form in the 20th century.
The castle was thus entering the modern era as a venerable monument of Danish history, when a dramatic event nearly made it disappear for good.
On the night of 16-17 December 1859, a badly extinguished chimney fire spread quickly through Frederiksborg Castle. The flames devoured much of the building and destroyed a large part of its historic interiors, its furniture and its works of art. It was a national catastrophe: one of Denmark's best-loved monuments was largely reduced to a burnt-out shell. Miraculously, the dazzling royal chapel survived almost intact, keeping its original 17th-century decoration and its precious organ.
The shock was such that a national subscription was organised to rebuild the castle, with Danes of every social class taking part in a gesture of patriotic pride. But the decisive role fell to one man: Jacob Christian Jacobsen (J.C. Jacobsen), founder of the Carlsberg brewery, one of the great industrialists and patrons of 19th-century Denmark. Jacobsen contributed a fundamental share of the funds to restore the castle's interiors.
Jacobsen went further than funding the reconstruction: he had an idea that would change Frederiksborg's destiny for good. Inspired by the historical portrait museums he had seen abroad, he proposed turning the restored castle into a great national history museum, a 'Danish Versailles' where the memory of the nation would be preserved through portraits of its kings, queens, scientists, artists and distinguished figures. He wanted a place that would teach Danes about their own past and awaken their patriotic pride.
So, in 1878, the Museum of National History of Denmark (Det Nationalhistoriske Museum) was founded inside the castle, as a department of the Carlsberg Foundation, which owns and funds it to this day. The reconstruction of the castle, respecting its Renaissance appearance, went on for decades. From the tragedy of the fire came, paradoxically, the institution that today gives the palace its meaning and its life.
Since it reopened as a museum, Frederiksborg has established itself as one of the most visited and best-loved places in Denmark, and as the great reliquary of the country's historical memory. The Museum of National History that J.C. Jacobsen devised occupies more than seventy rooms of the castle, decorated in the style of different periods, and holds the largest collection of historical portraits in Denmark: five centuries of kings, queens, nobles, soldiers, scholars, writers and artists hang on its walls, alongside large paintings of battles and events, furniture, tapestries and objects.
The collection is not a frozen relic: it keeps growing. Every year new portraits are commissioned of notable contemporary Danes —politicians, scientists, athletes, artists— so the gallery keeps alive the original purpose of reflecting the history of the nation up to the present. It is a museum in dialogue with its own time.
What the traveller sees today is an irresistible whole: Christian IV's Renaissance castle on its three islets, with its towers and its red brick reflected in the lake; the royal chapel that survived the fire, with its gilded decoration and its historic organ by the builder Compenius, still used in concerts; the restored baroque gardens facing the water, with their geometric parterres and their cascades; and the seventy rooms of the museum, a journey through Danish history.
Often called 'the most beautiful castle in Denmark', Frederiksborg combines as few places do architectural beauty, dynastic history and an educational vocation. It is also the heart of the castle route of northern Zealand, alongside Kronborg and the Louisiana museum, and one of the essential trips out from Copenhagen. From the dream of a builder king and the rescue by a brewer and patron came one of the great treasures of Danish heritage.