Denmark
Copenhagen
A flat, bike-first royal capital where the harbour in the middle of town is clean enough to swim in.
Copenhagen is a low, flat harbour capital where the painted merchant houses along Nyhavn are the postcard and a small bronze mermaid on a rock is the other thing everyone is sent to see. It is a city of royal palaces and a working port that cleaned its own water up so thoroughly that people now swim off public platforms in the middle of town. It is also where the New Nordic idea was worked out in the 2000s, which changed how Scandinavian kitchens cook and made a small capital a food destination.
Suggested stay
3–5 days
Language
Danish
Currency
DKK
Timezone
UTC+2
Why you'll love Copenhagen
The harbour cleaned to swimming standard, with public bathing platforms in the centre and small ferries used like buses
Bikes separated lanes wide enough to overtake on, flat ground and more bicycles than cars, which makes the whole city calmer
Nyhavn and the palaces a canal of eighteenth-century painted houses, and four royal mansions around a cobbled square with a guard change at midday
Food the New Nordic movement was worked out here, and it runs from the tasting menus down to the open sandwiches and the bakeries
Best time to visit
May-Sep
14-20° days
55.687° N, 12.570° E
UTC+2 · Europe/Copenhagen
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Weather & when to go to Copenhagen
Month by month: typical highs and lows, rainfall and rain days.
✓ Best May-Sep
Cards tinted by calculated verdict · big number = typical daily high, small = low · hover for conditions
When to avoid Copenhagen
Midwinter is dark, wet and windy rather than crisply snowy, with only a few useful hours of daylight and a wind off the sound that finds every gap in a coat. The pleasure garden in the middle of the city also shuts between its seasons rather than opening year round, so check before building a day around it. Summer is the obvious answer and everyone knows it: the harbour baths, the terraces and the trains to the castles up the coast all fill.
Top things to do in Copenhagen
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Nyhavn - the painted canal
scenic 👍 PopularA short arm of water dug in the 1670s so ships could unload in the middle of town, lined with narrow gabled houses in ochre, red and blue. Andersen lived in three of them at different times, and the wooden boats still moored along it are old.
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The pleasure garden in the middle of the city
culture arts 👍 PopularA nineteenth-century amusement garden right beside the central station, more park than fairground: lanterns in the trees, a wooden roller coaster from 1914, an open-air stage and lawns people simply sit on. It opens in seasons rather than year round.
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Christiansborg - the tower, the ruins and the tapestries
history ⭐ Highly recommendedParliament, supreme court and royal reception rooms share one palace on the islet where the city began. Underneath are the excavated foundations of the medieval castle, the reception halls hold seventeen modern tapestries of Danish history, and the tower is the tallest in the city and free to go up.
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Amalienborg and the changing of the guard
historyFour matching rococo mansions around an octagonal cobbled square, still the royal residence, with the guard marching across the city from their barracks each day to change at midday. The domed marble church closes one side of the view.
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Rosenborg Castle and the crown jewels
historyChristian IV's small Renaissance summer palace in the King's Garden, kept as a set of period rooms with a coronation throne of narwhal tusk, and the crown regalia still held in the basement vault.
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The National Museum
historyThe place to see what came out of the Danish ground: the Bronze Age sun chariot, lur horns, oak-coffin burials with clothing intact, and the Viking and rune stone collections, all in an old royal townhouse.
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The Glyptotek
culture artsA brewer's collection of Roman, Greek and Egyptian sculpture plus a serious room of French painting, built around a domed winter garden of palms and a fountain that is the warmest place in the city on a grey day.
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The Round Tower
historyA seventeenth-century observatory you climb by a wide spiral ramp rather than stairs, built so a horse and cart could get instruments to the top. Still an observatory, with a view over the old roofs.
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Langelinie and the Little Mermaid
scenic 👍 PopularThe bronze figure from Andersen's story sits on a rock at the edge of a harbour promenade, small and usually surrounded. The walk out along the water past the star-shaped Kastellet fortress is the better half of the trip.
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Harbour baths and the harbour buses
nature wildlife ⭐ Highly recommendedPublic swimming platforms are built into the harbour at Islands Brygge and elsewhere, with lifeguards in summer and water tested clean. The yellow public boats run the length of the harbour on ordinary transit tickets and pass most of the modern architecture.
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Christiania
culture artsA self-governing community founded in 1971 on an abandoned military site in Christianshavn, with its own rules, self-built houses and workshops along the ramparts. It has long had an open cannabis trade, which is illegal, contested, and the subject of repeated police action and of attempts by residents themselves to end it. Photography is restricted in parts and the signs saying so are meant seriously.
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Smorrebrod and the New Nordic table
foodOpen sandwiches on dense rye - pickled herring, roast pork with crackling, breaded plaice with remoulade - are the old tradition, still done properly in the covered market hall and in basement lunch rooms. The New Nordic kitchens that grew up here in the 2000s are the other half of the story.
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The waste plant with a ski slope on its roof
scenicOut on Amager, the city's waste-to-energy plant was built with a dry ski and toboggan slope down its roof, a walking path up it and a climbing wall on one flank, all open to the public with the harbour and the wind turbines laid out below.
Best areas to stay in Copenhagen
$ Budget $$ Mid-range $$$ Premium
Indre By
First-time visitors $$$The old town between the lakes and harbour
Explore hotels in Indre By →
Vesterbro
Eating & nightlife $$Old meatpacking yards, bars and coffee
Explore hotels in Vesterbro →
Norrebro
Best value $Young, mixed, cafes around the lakes
Explore hotels in Norrebro →
Christianshavn
Quiet & waterside $$$Canals, houseboats and old warehouses
Explore hotels in Christianshavn →
Osterbro
Families $$Leafy, residential, parks and playgrounds
Explore hotels in Osterbro →
Live nightly prices from Booking.com, Agoda and others, centred on Copenhagen
Getting to & around Copenhagen
Getting there
Fly into Kastrup and take the metro or a mainline train into the centre in about a quarter of an hour
Flight
Copenhagen Kastrup (CPH)
Eight km southeast of the centre on Amager, and unusually close for a hub of its size. A driverless metro runs from under the terminal to Kongens Nytorv and the old town in about fifteen minutes, and mainline trains from the same station reach the central station in around a quarter of an hour and carry on over the bridge into Sweden.
Train
Copenhagen Central Station
Trains from Hamburg and from across Denmark arrive at the central station beside the pleasure garden, and the line from Malmo and southern Sweden crosses the Oresund bridge in around forty minutes
Coach
Ingerslevsgade
Long-distance coaches from Germany, Sweden and around Denmark stop on the street along the back of the central station
Ferry
Langelinie & Nordhavn
The overnight ferry from Oslo berths at Langelinie, walking distance from the centre, and cruise ships use the quays further north
Getting around
Bike
Separated lanes on almost every street, flat ground and hire bikes everywhere; genuinely the fastest way across the city, and traffic expects you
TBC
Metro
Driverless, frequent and running all night at weekends, with the ring line reaching most districts a visitor uses
TBC
S-train
Suburban rail out to the deer park, the beaches and the castles along the coast north of the city
TBC
Harbour bus
Public boats run the length of the harbour on ordinary transit tickets, which makes them the cheapest canal tour going
TBC
Walking
The old town is compact and pedestrianised along Stroget, and the harbour promenades link most of the sights
Free
Bus
Fills in the cross-town gaps the rail lines miss, including the run out to Amager
TBC
Day trips from Copenhagen
Roskilde
Half dayCathedral & Viking ships
A brick cathedral holding the tombs of forty Danish monarchs, and on the fjord below it a museum built around five Viking ships raised from the water, with a working yard building sailing replicas beside it.
Getting there
train | car
30 min by train west
Kronborg at Helsingor
Half dayRenaissance castle
Shakespeare's Elsinore: a moated Renaissance fortress guarding the narrowest point of the sound, with casemates underneath holding a statue of a sleeping folk hero, and a maritime museum sunk into the dry dock next door.
Getting there
train | car
45 min by train north
Humlebaek and the modern art museum on the sound
Half dayArt in a coastal park
Low glass and brick wings threaded through a sculpture park on a bluff, with Sweden across the water. As much about the walk between the buildings and the lawn as about the collection inside.
Getting there
train | walk | car
35 min by train north, then a short walk
Frederiksborg Castle at Hillerod
Half dayMoated palace
A red-brick Renaissance palace spread over three islands in a lake, rebuilt after an 1859 fire with brewery money and now the museum of national history, with a terraced baroque garden across the water.
Getting there
train | car
40 min by train northwest
Dyrehaven
Half dayRoyal deer park
A former royal hunting forest of old oaks and open grass grazed by hundreds of deer, with a hunting lodge on the hill in the middle and a very old fairground just inside the gate.
Getting there
train | walk | car
25 min by train north
Malmo
Full daySweden over the bridge
Another country over a bridge and a tunnel, with a twisting residential tower on the waterfront, a moated castle and a compact old town. Carry a passport or identity card; there are checks on the crossing.
Getting there
train | car
40 min by train across the Oresund bridge
A little history of Copenhagen
Copenhagen began as a herring harbour on the sound, and its founding is usually dated to 1167, when Bishop Absalon fortified the islet now occupied by Christiansborg. The name means merchants' harbour, and the herring trade and the toll on ships passing up the sound made it rich enough to be worth taking; it became the capital in 1443. Christian IV, who reigned for most of the first half of the seventeenth century, is responsible for a startling amount of what visitors still look at: Rosenborg, the Round Tower, the Christianshavn canals and the sailors' terraces at Nyboder.
Two great fires in the eighteenth century and a British bombardment in 1807, which ended with the Danish fleet sailing away in British hands, wiped out much of the medieval city, which is why so much of the centre is elegant and eighteenth or nineteenth century rather than crooked and medieval. A cholera epidemic in 1853 forced the ramparts down and the city out into Norrebro, Vesterbro and Osterbro. Occupation from 1940 to 1945 is remembered above all for the ferrying of most of Denmark's Jews to safety in Sweden in 1943. The last three decades belong to the harbour: docks turned into swimming water, the bridge to Sweden, a driverless metro, and a food scene the rest of the region copied.
Bishop Absalon fortifies the islet where Christiansborg now stands
Copenhagen becomes the capital of Denmark
Christian IV's Round Tower is finished as an observatory with a spiral ramp
Fire destroys much of the medieval city; another follows in 1795
A British fleet bombards the city and carries off the Danish navy
Cholera brings the ramparts down and the city spreads into new districts
Most of Denmark's Jewish population is ferried across the sound to Sweden
The Oresund bridge opens and joins the city to southern Sweden by rail and road
Know before you go
Payment
Cards everywhere
English
Everywhere
Wifi
Reliable
Power
Type C / F / K
230 V, 50 Hz
Dialing
+45
The months our climate read flags to avoid: the wettest, lowest-rated weather of the year.
FAQs about Copenhagen
▸ How many days do you need in Copenhagen?
Three covers it properly: one for the old town, the palaces and the canal, one for the harbour, Christianshavn and the museums, and one for eating and walking without a list. A fourth buys a castle or the art museum up the coast.
▸ Is Copenhagen expensive?
Yes, straightforwardly, with restaurants and drinks the painful part. The mitigations are real though: the bike, the harbour baths, the palace tower and the parks cost nothing, bakeries and open sandwiches feed you well for little, and the harbour buses run on an ordinary transit ticket.
▸ Can you really swim in the harbour?
Yes. The port water was cleaned up through the 1990s and is tested through the season, and there are public bathing platforms in the middle of the city with lifeguards in summer. It is cold, and Danes treat that as part of the point.
▸ What should you know before walking into Christiania?
It is a self-governing community, not an attraction, and it has its own rules posted at the entrances. Photography is restricted in parts. There has long been an open cannabis trade there, which is illegal under Danish law, has drawn repeated police operations and has been contested by residents themselves. Walking through is ordinary and common; buying, photographing the trade or wandering into people's homes is not.
▸ Is Copenhagen worth visiting in winter?
It is dark, wet and short on daylight, and it rarely turns into a snowy postcard. What it does have is an indoor city: the museums, the covered market hall, the palaces, long lunches and the pleasure garden's winter opening. Come for that and it works; come for terraces and harbour swimming and it does not.
More in Denmark
Aarhus
A student port where you walk a ring of coloured glass over the rooftops and a whole old Danish town has been reassembled street by street.
✓ best May-Jun, Aug-SepBornholm
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✓ best May-Oct