Write a Review
Copenhagen Travel Guide: Reviews, photos, & videos
Summing up the Danish capital, the only word that comes to mind is dejlig, Danish for lovely. Straddling the Islands of Zealand and Amager, Copenhagen is a picture-perfect image of canals, cobbled streets and copper spires. It’s a very walkable city. Downtown shopping street Strøget and side streets make up the longest pedestrian shopping area in Europe. It’s also a very bikeable city. A third of Copenhagen’s residents commute to work by bicycle. No, that’s not a typo: a full one-third of the city favors two wheels and there are wide bike lanes everywhere. The city regularly tops ‘Most Livable City’ lists, such as the one by lifestyle magazine Monocle. Like the other Scandinavian capitals, it’s a very clean city.
The environmentally conscious city government is on a quest to make the city carbon neutral by 2025 and the water in the inner harbor is clean enough for a swim. You can’t say that about many big city harbors. The largest city in Denmark—and Scandinavia—Copenhagen has a population of 1.8 million in the metropolitan area and just over a million in the city proper. The city dates back to the 11th century, and has been the capital of Denmark since the first half of the 15th century. The name Copenhagen—København in Danish—means “merchants' harbor” and the city has always been an important port. Facing the Øresund strait, at the mouth of the Baltic Sea, the port controlled all traffic heading into the Baltic. Since the 2000 opening of the Øresund Bridge, linking Copenhagen to Malmö in Sweden, travelers and merchants alike have another option for getting across the water. The city’s most famous residents may have been storyteller Hans Christian Andersen and existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, but young Danes today are making their mark in design, architecture and fashion.
