Copenhagen

Copenhagen is a city that has decided not to be in a hurry. The streets are wide enough for cyclists and pedestrians to coexist without anyone needing to apologise, the harbour water is clean enough to swim in (which is taken very seriously by a population that swims year-round including, with the assistance of a sauna, in February), and the trains and metro run on time in a way that makes one feel slightly unobserved. The famous statue of the Little Mermaid is, as everyone now warns each other, considerably smaller than the photographs imply. So is the fuss made about her. So, in a number of endearing ways, is the rest of the city.

When to go

Late spring through summer is when the city is most itself: June and July with light until nearly ten in the evening and the harbour full of bathers, the cafés out on the pavements, and Tivoli Gardens running its full programme from early April through late September. August can be wetter than its reputation suggests. Winter is honest about itself: short days and a willingness on the part of every restaurant and bar to compensate with candles, blankets, and what the locals call hygge but might more accurately be called a high tolerance for being indoors. Tivoli's Christmas season, from mid-November, is the dark months' redeeming feature.

What it's actually like

The pleasure of Copenhagen is the way the parts fit together. Indre By, the medieval core, is small enough to walk across in twenty minutes. The 1.1-kilometre Strøget pedestrian artery, the round tower and the king's garden, the colourful canal-side houses of Nyhavn (touristed but genuinely handsome). Across the bridge in Christianshavn the canals carry on into a quieter quarter, with Freetown Christiania the alternative-living commune that has been negotiating its own status with the rest of the country since 1971. Vesterbro, the former red-light district behind the central station, has reinvented itself as a creative and food district. Nørrebro, on the other side of the lakes, is more diverse and less polished. The whole city runs on bicycles in a way that does not exhibit virtue. There is no other reasonable way to get to work.

There is also the food. The New Nordic movement started here, and what the rest of the world first dismissed as slightly joyless it now copies everywhere; Noma, its most famous kitchen, closed in 2024 and reopened a year later as a part-time food laboratory, a very Copenhagen way to handle having been the best in the world.

The neighbourhood you want

Vesterbro. Five minutes from the central station, ten from Tivoli, fifteen by bike to the harbour baths at Islands Brygge. Cafés and dinner spots run the length of Værnedamsvej and Istedgade. Indre By is the obvious alternative, central and atmospheric, at central-and-atmospheric prices. Nørrebro is cheaper, has better food, and less metro coverage. Stay away from the hotels immediately ringing the station; they are functional rather than enjoyable.

Don't miss

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, an hour north of the city in Humlebæk, reached by train along the east coast of Zealand. The 1958 building is essentially a gallery built to be a place to enjoy art in: long low galleries opening onto a sculpture garden that runs down to the Øresund with Sweden across the sound. The permanent collection is substantial (Giacometti, Henry Moore, Yayoi Kusama's mirror room) and the café is good enough to plan a visit around. Entry 145 kr; open until 22:00 Tuesday to Friday, which makes a late-afternoon-into-dinner the ideal arrangement. The forty-kilometre train ride along the coast is part of the pleasure.