🇩🇰 Denmark · Zealand and the east
Roskilde is one of those cities where the history of a whole country fits into a few blocks. It was Denmark's first capital, the centre of Viking power and later the great medieval bishopric, and even today it is the pantheon of the Danish monarchy: beneath the vaults of its cathedral lie almost every king and queen of Denmark of the past thousand years. Add to that an absolutely unique treasure, the museum that holds five genuine Viking ships recovered from the bottom of the fjord. Few cities this small offer so much.
Sitting at the head of a calm fjord, half an hour from Copenhagen, Roskilde combines that historical weight with a young and creative present: it is a university city and, above all, home to the legendary Roskilde Festival, one of the biggest music festivals in Europe, which every summer turns the fields on the outskirts into a temporary city of more than 100,000 people. That contrast between Gothic royal tombs and the energy of rock makes it fascinating.
This guide shows you how to make the most of Roskilde on a day trip from Copenhagen or as a more leisurely stop: what to see, how to get there by train, how to walk between the cathedral and the fjord, and what to eat. Roskilde is one of the best escapes in Zealand and a condensed lesson in Danish history, from the Viking world to the royal pantheon, beside a peaceful fjord.
Roskilde was for centuries the heart of Denmark. Tradition says it was founded by the Viking king Harald Bluetooth (Harald Blåtand) in the 10th century, the same monarch who unified and Christianised the country and who gives his name —through his runic initials— to Bluetooth technology. The city was a royal capital and, above all, the great episcopal seat of Denmark from the time when, around the year 1000, one of the kingdom's first Christian churches was raised here. In 1170 work began on the present brick cathedral, the first brick Gothic cathedral in northern Europe and today a World Heritage Site, which became the mausoleum of Danish royalty. Roskilde had its heyday in the Middle Ages as one of the great religious centres of the north, with dozens of churches and monasteries. The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century (1536) stripped it of much of its ecclesiastical power, and the capital had already moved to Copenhagen. Its name is also tied to the humiliating Peace of Roskilde of 1658, the treaty by which Denmark ceded to Sweden the provinces of Scania and much of the south of the Scandinavian peninsula. In the 20th century, the discovery and recovery of five Viking ships sunk in the fjord (the Skuldelev ships, raised in 1962) and the birth of the Roskilde Festival in 1971 gave it new international fame. 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.
Roskilde was born in the heart of the Viking age, at the head of a fjord that was a natural motorway to the sea. Its very name tells the story: it is thought to derive from 'Roars kilde', the spring of the legendary King Roar (Hroðgar), the same mythical figure who appears in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, joined to the word 'kilde' ('spring' or 'well'). The area was linked from remote times to the sagas of the Danish kings, and a few kilometres away, at Lejre, archaeologists have excavated what was a great royal seat of the Skjöldung dynasty, with enormous banqueting halls from the early Middle Ages.
Tradition attributes the founding of the town to King Harald Blåtand, Harald 'Bluetooth', who reigned in the second half of the 10th century. This monarch was a decisive figure: he unified much of Denmark, converted it to Christianity and left a record of his deeds on the famous runestones of Jelling, in Jutland. A curious detail made him famous a thousand years later: Bluetooth wireless technology takes its name from him, and its logo combines the runes of his initials, in tribute to a king who 'united' peoples the way the technology unites devices. According to tradition, Harald died and was buried in Roskilde around the year 985-987.
In that Viking and early medieval Roskilde one of the first Christian wooden churches in the whole kingdom was raised, the seed of the future cathedral. The town, sheltered at the head of its fjord, soon became a first-rank centre of royal and religious power, at a moment when Denmark was leaving Norse paganism behind to enter Christian Europe.
Through the High and Late Middle Ages, Roskilde was one of the most important towns in Denmark, and for a time its effective capital. The kings had a residence here, and above all the town established itself as the kingdom's great episcopal seat: the bishop of Roskilde was one of the most powerful people in Denmark, with vast estates and enormous political influence. The key figure was Absalon, bishop of Roskilde and later archbishop of Lund, warrior and statesman, adviser to kings and founder —according to tradition— of the fortress that would give rise to Copenhagen in 1167.
It was Absalon who, around 1170, drove the construction of the present brick cathedral on the site of the old wooden and stone churches. The work, in the new brick Gothic style, went on for decades and turned Roskilde into an architectural beacon whose model would spread across the whole Baltic. At its medieval height, the town had an impressive number of churches, monasteries and convents —more than a dozen places of worship, it is said— which made it famous as a town of bell towers and the spiritual centre of the kingdom.
Roskilde thus lived a golden age as a religious capital. Pilgrims, clerics and nobles came to the town, and its cathedral began to take in the tombs of kings and bishops. However, the growing importance of Copenhagen —better placed for Baltic trade and chosen as royal capital in 1443— steadily reduced Roskilde's political weight, and it became more and more an ecclesiastical seat rather than a centre of worldly power.
The 16th century brought a radical turn. In 1536, Denmark adopted the Lutheran Protestant Reformation, and the power of the Catholic Church collapsed. For Roskilde, a town that lived to a large extent from its enormous ecclesiastical apparatus, it was a crushing blow: the monasteries and convents were dissolved, Church property was confiscated, and many of its numerous medieval churches were demolished or fell into ruin. The town, once a religious hive, went quiet and shrank, reduced to a quiet provincial place in the shadow of a flourishing Copenhagen.
The cathedral, though, survived and changed function: from a Catholic church it became a Lutheran one and consolidated its role as the royal pantheon of the Danish monarchy, a use it keeps to this day. Generation after generation, the kings and queens of Denmark were buried beneath its vaults in ever more sumptuous chapels.
The name of Roskilde was also carved into the national memory for a bitter reason: the Peace of Roskilde of 1658. After a disastrous war against Sweden, in which the Swedish army of Charles X Gustav marched on foot across the frozen straits to the gates of Copenhagen, Denmark was forced to sign a catastrophic treaty in Roskilde. It ceded to Sweden the rich provinces of Scania (Skåne), Halland and Blekinge, at the southern end of the Scandinavian peninsula, along with other territories. With that peace, Denmark lost close to a third of its territory and its population at the time, and the border with Sweden was fixed more or less where it is today. The Peace of Roskilde is remembered as one of the greatest humiliations in Danish history.
For centuries, the fishermen of Roskilde knew that in the fjord, near the village of Skuldelev, there was something that made navigation difficult in one channel: they told stories of a sunken ship, which they called 'Queen Margrete's ship'. In fact, hidden under the water was one of the most important archaeological finds in Viking history.
Investigations began in 1957, and in 1962 a spectacular and pioneering underwater excavation was carried out: archaeologists built a cofferdam (a temporary dyke) around the site, pumped out the water and brought to light the remains of five 11th-century Viking ships. There was not one but five different vessels which, around the year 1070, had been deliberately loaded with stones and sunk to block the channel and protect Roskilde from possible attacks by sea.
The five ships —known as the Skuldelev ships— turned out to be very different types: a large warship over 30 metres long, able to carry dozens of warriors, a sturdy ocean-going merchant ship (a knarr, like those that reached Greenland and America), a Baltic trading ship, a fishing and transport boat, and a nimble smaller warship. Together they offered an unrivalled picture of Viking shipbuilding in all its diversity.
To conserve and display that treasure, the Viking Ship Museum (Vikingeskibsmuseet) was built beside the fjord and opened in 1969. There the fragile original remains, carefully reassembled on metal frames, are shown in front of large windows looking onto the water. Over time, the museum was completed with a working boatyard where craftspeople build sailable replicas using period techniques, some of which have crossed the sea as far as Ireland to prove their capability. The find gave Roskilde back its old lustre, now as one of the world capitals of Viking archaeology.
In the 20th century, Roskilde turned into a modern and dynamic city, one that managed to combine the weight of its thousand-year history with a new, youthful identity. In 1972, Roskilde University (RUC) was founded, known for its innovative teaching methods and its focus on project work, which brought thousands of students and a fresh, progressive air to the city.
But what catapulted Roskilde to international fame was music. In 1971, inspired by the spirit of Woodstock, two secondary school students organised a small music festival. From that seed grew the Roskilde Festival, which over the years became one of the biggest rock and music festivals in Europe. Every summer, at the end of June and the start of July, the fields south of the city turn into a temporary city of more than 100,000 people, with the world's biggest artists on its stages. The festival is a non-profit foundation that gives its proceeds to charitable, cultural and humanitarian causes, and it is a social phenomenon deeply rooted in Danish youth culture.
The festival also lived through its most tragic episode: in the year 2000, during a concert, nine young people were crushed to death in a crowd surge, a disaster that shook the country and led to permanently stronger safety measures at mass concerts around the world.
As a tribute to that musical vocation, the Ragnarock museum opened in 2016, devoted to pop, rock and youth cultures, in the former industrial district of Musicon, now a creative quarter. Today Roskilde is a fascinating synthesis: the city of the Viking kings and the royal pantheon, of the World Heritage cathedral and the Skuldelev ships, is at the same time the Danish capital of rock. Few cities condense a thousand years of history alongside the energy of the present quite so well.